


by halves, by quarters

by extraordinarilyprettyteeth



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Canon-Typical Violence, Look what I did, M/M, Non-Mass Au, Slow Burn, The Gang Does Politics, everything i write has some element of slow burn to it okay, except Danzo, fuck danzo lives 2k19, im so sorry, this was supposed to be 5k
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-25
Updated: 2019-01-24
Packaged: 2019-10-15 20:56:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 22,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17536118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/extraordinarilyprettyteeth/pseuds/extraordinarilyprettyteeth
Summary: Politics, it seems, are potentially worse than most other forms of torture known to man.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> written for the [2018 gift exchange](https://shiitasecretsanta.tumblr.com/). i just have no sense of time management or manner in which to control exactly how Long something gets.

“Shisui?” Fugaku continues to stare directly into his soul, as if he knows every single impure thought Shisui has had since the age of twelve—which, admittedly, is no small amount—and plans to use them against him in the very near future. “Would you care to join us?”There is an unnecessary emphasis on the last two words that seems to imply that the alternate option is a slow and painful death. “Yes, sir.” Shisui swallows, hard, and absolutely does _not_ picture his head on a pike behind Fugaku's chair. “Of course, sir.” In his peripheral, he can see Itachi tilting his head about three degrees further and staring, which means he's annoyed, and probably going to give Shisui several disapproving looks over the course of the next hour of this godforsaken clan meeting, and— “I apologize.” He is poignantly aware of the less than favorable attention he has from all sides right now, and accidentally drops his chair back onto all four legs with a too-loud _slam_.

The set of creases between Itachi's eyebrows deepens; when Shisui grins apologetically in his direction, Itachi focuses studiously on his hands instead.

Over the past year they have seen less of one another, spent enough time apart that looking at Itachi feels not unlike being punched in the gut, or doused in icy water. Shisui figures that if the weird infatuation persists, he might as well save Fugaku the trouble and go drown _himself_ in the Nakano.

Fugaku shuffles the paperwork in front of him into order; the sheaves of notices and official letterhead look out of place in his calloused hands. “I appreciate your _cooperation_ , Shisui,” he drawls, and the lack of an honorific is conspicuous, and damning to boot. “As I was saying.” He clears his throat and graces Shisui with one more terrifying look before continuing. “The clan's position with the village is precarious as is. As you all know—”

Shisui returns to scanning the room, observing all the faces at the table; Fugaku's voice dissolves into background noise, because apparently his brain cannot function at a standstill for more than five seconds consecutively. He also figures he isn't _entirely_ to blame; this is the fourth meeting in as many weeks, and despite the gravity implied by the situation he just wants to be _doing_ something.

“—more than graciously, although I understand that the sentiment for which many of you desired a more, ah, _direct_ means of action still exists in part, although—”

Out of the corner of his eye he can see Izumi in her jounin vest, further down his side of the table; somehow, god bless her, she appears to be paying rapt attention. She makes eye contact with Shisui briefly and raises an eyebrow before looking back in Fugaku's direction.

Shisui fights off a yawn, and figures he better start paying attention. He tries, generally, to _not_ be this awful _;_ he'd just come from debriefing, for god's sake, and Ibiki is terrible on a _good_ day, let alone a day like today. He just wants some food, maybe, and oh god, some _sleep,_ or potentially to _not_ feel as if he'd rolled in all the dust between here and the nation's borders—

As if from a distance, he hears Fugaku dismiss the attendees; the way he sets his papers on the table in front of him and presses a hand over his eyes does not, however, bode well. He glances to Itachi, three seats down from his father; Itachi stares back for just long enough to make it uncomfortable before ducking his head.

Izumi shoots him a rather sympathetic look as she meanders by, clearly trying to give him time to make a break for it. “Coming?” she asks.

“Yeah, actually,” Shisui rushes out, darting up. He makes it two steps from the door, right on Izumi's heels, when Fugaku's wonderful, froglike tones cut into his near-escape.

“Shisui, a moment.” It is absolutely not a request of any kind whatsoever; Fugaku continues to look as if he wants to throttle Shisui on the spot, so it must be clan business, or potentially the moment he finally meets his end.

As the remaining people filter out, he indicates the seat directly across from him with one hand. “Sit, if you would.” The nicety seems to physically pain Fugaku as it passes his lips.

Bewildered, Shisui slumps back into his seat and absently wonders what he's done this time. Really, he's behaved himself, he thinks desperately; there has been absolutely _nothing_ of note involving him in months—

Obito cuffs him on the back of the head as he passes by. “Must be tough to be you,” he says, and does not sound at all sorry for Shisui.

“Asshole,” Shisui mutters, and honestly, death is appearing a kinder mistress by the second.

Fugaku's stare is enough to eviscerate. _“Language.”_ When the door slams shut behind them, he doesn't move a muscle.

The silence slides past in chunks of time, and each and every second feels like half an hour. The footsteps and voices outside recede, first to a murmur, and then to nothing but the almost-mute buzz of the lamps ensconced on the walls.

Shisui keeps his eyes trained on the table top, follows the movement of the grain with one finger. He absolutely does not look up, does not look straight ahead at Fugaku, imperious and directly in his line of sight, about to ask something questionable of him, no doubt—or at Itachi, across the table and several seats down. No, absolutely not. He does not at all find that watching Itachi move a stray piece of hair back from his face is captivating. Not at all, actually. Or, he would not have found it captivating at all in the first place, if he _had_ been looking, which he definitely _was not_.

Fugaku raps a hand on the table, jolting Shisui back to attention. “Tsunade tires of the position of Hokage.”

Shisui narrows his eyes, sits up a little straighter. “Common knowledge, I thought.” He rubs one eye and blinks rapidly, waits for his vision to clear. He can feel the remnential sweat from the journey back pricking beneath his forehead protector, and he'd have it off in a second if he were sure it wouldn't send a mixture of dirt and sand across the council's table. God, but does he hate Suna.

“For some, maybe.” Fugaku's expression is unreadable, characteristic dark eyes flickering over Shisui as if assessing him, measuring him against some imaginary rubric that no one else happens to be privy to.

In Shisui's peripheral, he can see Itachi shift a little in his seat—not much at all, just enough to remind the room at large that he is, indeed, sentient. Shisui swallows, rubs his _other_ eye and probably grinds no small amount of sand into his sclera, and forces his gaze back to Fugaku. “How might I be of service?” It isn't meant to come out nearly as stiffly as it does, but politeness is far from reach when he thinks he might be about to fossilize.

Fugaku gives absolutely zero quarter, and ignores Shisui's question. “The council intends to choose the next Hokage from clan ranks,” he says slowly, and each word is weighted. “I'd like you to ensure that we aren't taken advantage of.”

Shisui presses his lips into a thin line, weighs how much he enjoys having his head attached to his body before speaking again. “Of course.” It takes all the self-control in the world to not look over at Itachi again, although he's fairly certain that Itachi's gaze is burning a hole into the side of _his_ skull. He determines that this is a decidedly tactless time to tell Fugaku that teaching children not to stare is proper etiquette.

He fails, though, as he usually does when it comes to Itachi, and Shisui meets his eyes for a split second before looking away. It's jarring, certainly, but more telling is the conviction there, the implications, the points of fact that Shisui has to connect for himself.

“Itachi,” Fugaku says, although he does not turn to look at his son. “Thank you.”

This is a dismissal—a quiet, polite one, but a dismissal. It sets Shisui's teeth on edge, demonstrates the insidiousness of 'need to know', reminds them both that there really isn't ever any escaping from it, no matter how much _progress_ the village makes. They're a far cry from six, seven years ago (and Shisui still dreams about Danzo, but that's long gone, done and over with, who is he to complain, since he still has all his limbs and both eyes?), no longer on the brink of a coup, but there is always the rustle of discontent, of misrepresentation.

Itachi gets up silently, but lets his footfalls echo hard enough against the floor to be deliberate; redistribution of chakra to muffle unnecessary noise is basic, one of the first things learned, so the even, staccato repetition of his footsteps is purposeful, a statement. “Father.” He pauses near the door, inclines his head momentarily. Shisui memorizes the graceless way he proves a point, the manner in which he makes his way through a room, the curvature of one calloused hand.

When the door falls shut again, it is with a sense of finality; a scaffolding seems to fall away from Fugaku's face, and the resoluteness and the worry overpower the diplomacy. “You need to understand—”

“He's wanted to be Hokage since he was seven.” Shisui leans back in his chair, crosses his arms over his chest. “Maybe even younger. My memory fails me at times.” He chews the inside of his cheek and waits.

The bags under Fugaku's eyes look far more pronounced now than they did moments ago. “It's a placatory gesture.” He sighs. “They want a figurehead. Something they can point to when we call on them, ask them what they've done for us.”

Shisui thinks about the Nakano, about the feeling of unwelcome hands on his face, about waking up with his palms pressed to his eyes, as if trying to hold them into his head. “Why me?” He blinks several times, to combat the sudden phantom dryness. “He's head of ANBU. I'm sure any of them would be happy to—”

“It has to be another one of us.” Fugaku runs a hand over his face, briefly, in an aborted motion—it's half-hearted, peremptory. “In addition.” He looks far older, now.

Shisui sucks in a breath. “You think it's that bad?” He does not voice the rest of his concerns—that this is a fail-safe, that he's expected to assist in bringing about a forced change of mind in whomever necessary. The longer he sits here, the more likely it seems.

“We have no way of knowing with any kind of certainty.” Fugaku inclines his head slightly, rests one hand on the table. It's striking, how much he has aged in the last eight years; there's a quietness and a resignation that was far from extant a decade ago. “I'm asking as clan head, I hope you understand.” He clears his throat, and the implication of _and as a father_ is there, but Fugaku has never been the man who cares for that sort of emotional display. “To watch him. Not as an advisor, just—just as a companion.”

“A glorified bodyguard,” Shisui retorts. “I mean, fine, but it's _politics_. No one would get away with killing him in his sleep.”

Fugaku fixes him with a look. “You would think that, wouldn't you?” He shakes his head, and the way he breathes out could almost be a laugh, if he were anyone else. “Your continued idealism is astounding.”

Shisui bites down harder on the inside of his cheek and digs his nails into his arm. “Is that all?” The tension in the room is too much, the unsaid overwhelming. He hates clan meetings for good reason, and had hoped to time his arrival back in Konoha in such a way as to accidentally miss this one. The possibility of an Uchiha kage has been circulating in rumors, in circumspect whispers; in the month he's been gone, it's clearly become a reality. “When do I start?”

With the way the dying sunlight slides through the windows, it could be dawn or dusk or any number of times in between. It doesn't seem to matter as much any more, because in this room there is nothing but the slow tick of the clock and an electric buzz and the overbearing weight of words like _duty_ and _piety_ and _unconditional obedience—_

“When I instruct you to.” Fugaku clears his throat and makes to stand, collects his charts and balances and paperwork and grievances. “Don't take any more outside missions for the meantime.” When he pushes his chair back, the scrape across the floor is deafening; his footfalls are heavier than Itachi's, as if he doesn't care for treading lightly.

There's annoyance growing in the pit of his stomach, agitation and discontent and an uncomfortable sense of foreboding all at once. “So I just wait around?” Shisui can't quite keep the bristling out of his tone.

Fugaku pauses at the door.

Shisui can see his shadow on the far wall, motionless. A snapshot of a figurehead, he thinks.

“I'd expect so.”

When the door slams shut for a third time, he isn't entirely surprised.

* * *

Shisui tries to sleep for the better part of an hour before he gives up on the concept as a whole, now and possibly for the foreseeable future as well. It's very easy to toss left, worry. Toss right, wonder. Lay on your back, conjure up the worst possible scenarios, imagine Fugaku's face when you fail him. Cover your eyes with an arm to block out the moonlight filtering in, do not think of the way Itachi would not meet your eyes. Toss right again and look at the clock.

When he finally drags himself back out of bed and into some semblance of clothing, he's not tired in the slightest. Shisui can feel the cold in his hands, against his face—it's a prickly reassurance, a welcome reminder of life, of the _extancy_ of life, of how wonderful it is to _not_ be dead—

Of course, Shisui isn't entirely surprised when he finds himself clearing the last ridge before the bluffs, the copses of trees and rocks and moss that overlook the deepest eddies of the Nakano. He slows his pace, makes his footfalls heavier, snaps a few twigs—if anything has remained the same since childhood, it's _this_ , he thinks, and ducks under a low-hanging branch. This has been the place to come to, with its own orbit, its own gravitational pull.

Seeing Itachi already there is not at all a shock. He's leaning against the last tree, the one furthest from the rest of them.

Shisui measures his steps across the forest floor, one by one by one until the bark of that last tree is safely under one of his hands and he's leaning against the opposite side, peering around the trunk's curvature to Itachi. “It's kind of cold for this, isn't it?”

Itachi snorts a little, in what might be amusement. “I thought you'd be asleep.” He shifts his weight, and Shisui can see in his peripheral the flicker of movement. “You nearly were, before I left.”

“Ah, well.” Shisui smiles, a little wry. “He has an, uh, kind of monotonous way of speaking?” When he leans his head against the tree, he can see Itachi in profile. He's looking down, just as he was earlier, but now his eyes are restless, flicking from moss to skin to stone in a perpetual litany.

“He does.”

The silence drags for a moment, and Shisui desperately wishes that it were a year ago, or two, or four, and that they hadn't grown apart. He's never quite sure what to say now, because it might be too much or too little or an unwelcome opinion, but what other options are there? “I heard you're giving up ANBU,” he says, careful. When he moves forward a little, he tells himself it's because the knots of the tree are digging into his side. It is not at all because Itachi will have to look him in the eye now, if he ever feels like looking up at all.

“That I am.” There's tension there, caught in Itachi's neck and shoulders and in the stiff way he holds his hands; he _does_ look up, and then to a point somewhere over Shisuis shoulder, and then down again. Mesmerizing. “It wouldn't be prudent to continue in light of—”

“In light of you getting the hat.” Shisui would usually feel a little guilty for interrupting, but there's a part of him that speaks too quickly, jumps from fact to conclusion to extrapolation with all the ease of a mud frog. He crosses his arms over his chest. He's been toeing at a particularly stubborn rock embedded in the ground for a minute or two, and he can feel it coming loose under the continued pressure. “Were you going to say anything?”

Itachi sighs. “You were always gone.” He does it again—looks up at Shisui and then away again. The foliage casts sharp shadows across his forehead and cheek. “Never a good time.”

“For something like that, don't you think you would have _made_ the time?” Shisui forces himself to stop there, digs fingernails into his biceps, focuses on the cold ground and air and atmosphere and tells himself he will _not_ lose his temper. Sometimes he thinks it's only his outsides that grew with age, and that the years have wicked away at his patience instead of his body. “We used to be—” Best friends, he wants to say; best friends, like brothers—but that wouldn't be right, more like—like the _same person_ , or maybe they should have been, because Shisui runs his mouth too much and Itachi never says enough, and maybe together they would have balanced each other out—

Itachi meets Shisui's gaze this time, and holds it. “Things are different.” His eyes drift momentarily to the puckered scar tissue under Shisui's right eye, Danzo's legacy. “Unstable.”

Shisui raises both eyebrows, tries for a smile. “I still have both eyes in my head.”

“The sentiment that prompted Danzo still exists.”

“You don't think I know that?” Shisui _does_ smile this time, although he's afraid it isn't entirely pleasant. “They want to use you as a figurehead.” He feels rather far removed from all of this, caught up in the chill and the washed-out cast of the moonlight and the touch memory of what metal feels like beneath your eye socket, what it feels like to be immobilized by a hand on your neck— “ _Nothing_ is different. They think you're easy because you're so quiet, because you love the village so damn much, because you're _loyal_ —” There's the smallest bit of vitriol there; Shisui can hear it in his own voice, but for the love of whatever higher power might or might not be, he can't temper it, can't watch his— can't watch Itachi _do_ this—

Itachi says absolutely nothing. He continues to meet Shisui's gaze, and this time it is Shisui who looks down at the ground, keeps kicking at that rock.

“Politics are gonna eat you alive.”

When Itachi answers, he tilts his head back a little, lifts his chin as if he's acting on a stage. Shisui wonders exactly how many of his emotions are a farce, are merely grabs at normalcy. “I do my duty to my village and to my clan.” He swallows, and there are all the tell-tale signs of nervousness unique to Itachi, minute gestures and expressions and the _lack_ thereof—it feels like something half-forgotten, a language he was fluent in as a child, grammar and syntax rusted from disuse.

Shisui watches the muscles in his neck move, watches the slight hitch in the rise and fall of his chest as he breathes (and that's new, isn't it, and maybe it's something, maybe it isn't), does not let himself acknowledge any of the numerous things he is thinking about, because that's probably in violation of some type of village conduct policy or something. “You're so dramatic,” he murmurs. It doesn't seem wrong to let something warmer color his words, something softer. In that moment he realizes, unfortunately, exactly why Fugaku tasked him with this farce of a complication. “It's—it will be fine. We'll figure it out, okay?”

Itachi is stone-faced, washed-out in the moonlight. “They were talking about it again,” he says, and there is something very tired in the planes of his face, the timbre of his voice. “This past summer. The coup.”

And there it is again—the coup, the village, the elders, the violence, the death. It's all getting very repetitive. Shisui had been hoping that the tension would have played out for a duration including at least the last of his natural (or unnatural) lifespan, but clearly that was aiming far too high. “In an official capacity?” Shisui exhales slowly, and it's as if the day is creeping up on him in fits and starts, exhaustion filtering through his limbs; he gives up on standing, and flops into a slouching seat at the base of the tree instead.

Itachi's mouth twitches. “No.” He peers down at Shisui and appears to think over joining him as thoroughly as if it were a tactical stratagem—which, in all honesty, it might as well be.

“I take it you continue to eavesdrop like a twelve year old?” Shisui grins up at him.

It isn't entirely surprising when Itachi sits—cross-legged, circumspect, spine straight (morals straighter)—in the mess of knotted roots and moss. His hands flit around one another, restless and birdlike. “I'll have to act surprised when he tells me you're to accompany me,” Itachi says, rather quietly.

Shisui's smile widens—it's _something_ , at least, some remnential piece of the camaraderie between them before the first attempted coup, before Danzo, before Shisui's endless stream of missions outside the village gates, before Itachi's near-absorption by ANBU, before— “I _was_ thinking you went a little easily earlier. Surprising, honestly—you listening to Fugaku at first request?” Before they grew up, Shisui figures, and wonders when, exactly, all that happened.

Itachi shrugs, brushes a piece of hair away from his face. “Not worth arguing. I've known about the village's proposition for some time now.” He clears his throat, avoids Shisui's eyes. It's as if they're children again, except now there's far more between them—parsed silences, years of indecision, too much space. “I should have known better than to think my father would allow it without some sort of caveat.”

“Caveat, huh?” Shisui tips his head back; the bark and moss is rough against his scalp. There's something exposed about this, and he thinks maybe it's the lack of a forehead protector, or maybe the absence of any possible official guise his venture out here could fall under. “Has he talked to the village about it yet?”

“I don't think so.”

“I can't imagine them liking the idea.” The sky is remarkably clear; there's nothing but pulled-cotton wisps of clouds, sparse and low, skittering through the atmosphere on some higher current. “I mean, you dedicate an entire clan to some—some _police force—_ just to keep them out of the way, and then—”

Itachi looks up, frowning. “They disbanded the police force after—”

Shisui knows exactly what comes next—after Danzo, after Root and all its sublimations came to light, after the reveal of whatever deep-seated hatred so many of the village's politicians hold for a century-old grievance, after _you_. “The sentiment is still there.” He stretches, breathes in and out, and for a moment it's easy to forget that things _are_ different now, both better and more terrible than eight, nine years ago. It's easy to forget it's been so long, too, when every month or two there's yet another surreal dream, yet another reminder. “Trust me on that.”

“I haven't seen any of it.” Itachi looks rather perplexed, and it takes every increment of composure Shisui has not to laugh.

“You grew up to be too intimidating for that, Itachi.” Shisui presses his lips together, chooses his words as if he's picking weapons out of a discarded pile, out of someone else's flak vest. “The head of special operations—” He shakes his head, settles his hands into his lap, tells them rather sternly to stay put. “No, they would never.”

There's something steely in Itachi's affect, something grown and cultivated through years of training, and it hurts to see, because somewhere underneath that there's still the child that loves his baby brother more than anything, the child that just wanted to do the right thing, the child that didn't fully comprehend what the cost might be. “You're hardly home any more,” Itachi says, and his words are measured and slow. “Are you entirely certain on that point?”

From Itachi, this roughly translates to something like, 'I don't really believe you, I'm just too polite to say it that way, and please sit up straight, Shisui'.

Shisui closes his eyes for a moment and prays for patience, or maybe some sort of divine intervention. “People talk.” Speaking feels like picking his way through carefully placed tripwires. “Ask Izumi, too, if you don't believe me, which—” He pauses, glances sidelong at Itachi. “She'll know too.”

Itachi says nothing; the earth says nothing either. Too cold for crickets—they have all either died or gone to sleep underground this close to winter.

“They forget,” Shisui says slowly, and he looks up as he speaks, because anything is easier than this look-look away game they seem to be playing of late. “They forget that we're Uchiha. Izumi, she's half, although you wouldn't know it by the way she fights, but—”

“You're significantly less morose than average,” Itachi finishes. “Well-liked.”

“Less morose than average.” Shisui catches the unsaid—closer to the village than the clan, further away from the point of origin. “Right, like—”

“Less like an Uchiha,” Itachi finishes for him, and if Shisui didn't know him half as well, he would have missed the catch of anger underlying his words.

“Essentially.” Shisui chews his lip, crosses his arms again and then uncrosses them. “It's going to be fine, though.” He swallows, and this time he does not dare to look at Itachi. “We're going to fix it.”

Itachi ignores him, speaks as if Shisui has said nothing. “What do they say, then?” he asks, and there's bitterness there. “What do they say, when they think we don't hear?”

“It doesn't matter.” It does, though, and Shisui can never let him realize how much it does. “It _won't_ matter.”

Itachi snorts and looks away. In the monochrome shadows and dishwater moonlight, he looks like something ancient, some otherworldy thing.

Shisui immediately reprimands himself for the thought. “You'll be a great kage.” He lets the earnestness of it all seep into his tone this time, leans over to bump his shoulder against Itachi's.

“A puppet.”

“A great kage,” Shisui repeats, and he ignores the warmth emanating from Itachi's skin, because they are both adults now, and the leeway for tactile, childish comforts is long gone; that likely doesn't matter, because Itachi has always hated the vast majority of touch anyway. “Let me help you.” The worst part, Shisui thinks, as he sits there, is that he would do absolutely anything. Once you kill for someone, what is there left to throw any shades of doubt? What is left to garner any second thoughts? He can't quite seem to come up with anything, and it's been years since the first time he killed for Itachi.

Itachi shifts his weight, clearly some tacit flavor of uncomfortable. “You won't be able to leave the village.” There is something running underneath the superficial words, some unknown emotion that evokes regret. “I don't want to stop you—”

Shisui laughs, although it's closer to a heavy huff than any true laughter. “Stop me from what?” The tiredness is returning, and there's something dragging behind his eyes, as if the world is slowed, soft and syrupy. “From doing what I want?” The idea sends a shiver of restless energy through him; he suddenly cannot find an appropriate place for his hands, or an appropriate slant for his thoughts. He tugs a hand through his hair, grimacing at the bark pieces caught at his hairline.

There is something incomprehensible that flits across Itachi's features, laid bare for just a fragment of a second. “From living a life.” The words are formal, clunky and ill-suited to his mouth. “Your own life.” Itachi traces a finger over the tiny white blooms poking their wary heads up out of the moss. “I know how you like to keep busy.” The implication is more than clear, and it's echoed by Shisui's own conscience: you're running, you're trying to put the devil behind you, you keep forgetting that temporality is an illusion, that spatial dimensions mean nothing, that _nothing_ means _anything_ when you're running from a long-dead farce that lives in the back of your mind—

“Me not being in Konoha long is best for everyone.” He cannot keep the sharpness out of his voice, and he just hopes to whatever is out there that it's enough to mask the hurt. “Trust me.”

“You presume to know about what other people need.” Itachi cuts the words off as if he's pulling clusters of grapes from a vine, knife sharp and eyes sharper. “What other people desire.” His voice seems to catch on the last word, although it might be Shisui's wishful thinking, tripping over a layabout ego.“Is that some part of your bloodline you failed to mention?”

Shisui can already hear the unsaid, the 'among other things', the accusations of secret keeping. It's enough to stir his blood, enough to make him restless with it. It's easier to excuse this way, he tells himself. Call it by anger, and by no other name, because to name a thing is to give it power, and if he names whatever this feeling is, it is doubtless more than enough to undo him. “Itachi,” he says, and it's as if he watches from somewhere far off, somewhere up high between tree branches and cirrus clouds and the high wheedling calls of starlings. “Stop.” His touches are hesitant, soft, and it's nothing compared to how close they were as children, but it's something.

Surprisingly enough, Itachi doesn't shy away from the hand on his knee; he instead looks Shisui in the eye. It feels like an invasion, like being gutted in some other, illusory world, with only a twinge in his stomach in this one. “I apologize.” His eyes are dark, bottomless, without any traces of red. Out here, it's as if they are ordinary people. “I was out of line.”

“Let me help you.” The urgency in his own tone surprises Shisui. “God, I know this is your dream, but let me help you.” Lean on me, he wants to say. They'll rip you apart if you let them, and you'd show your throat with an apology and a sigh.

Itachi looks down, briefly, and then back up. “Shisui.” There's something recriminatory in his tone, some sort of private guilt.

“Stop that.” Shisui searches his face, is almost grieved to find resolution there, acceptance without aspiration. “Please.” Be selfish for once, he wants to say, be selfish and maybe act with a shade of self-preservation. “I know you think you don't know me any more, but please—”

Itachi opens his mouth as if to speak, and then seems to think better of it.

“No,” Shisui says, cutting him off. In that moment, he is entirely certain that he's lost all higher brain function. Itachi mid-sentence is just as beautiful as all of the other iterations he's been trying to avoid, lips parted and brow furrowed in concern, and Shisui is about to resolve to take the next possible away mission when he realizes he _can't_ now. “No, you listen.”

Itachi's silences become repetitive, Shisui thinks, but each one is a variation on the same steady heartbeat, or the space between breaths—new, different, suspect. Absence of speech becomes a dialect all its own, pith to peel away. There's something in his face that seems to ask what Shisui could _possibly_ have to say, and it's measured in the degree of tilt to his head and the ever-darkening shadows under his eyes. “I'm not trying to keep you in the village.” There's more than an undertone of sharpness to his words. “Far be it from me.”

Shisui freezes for a moment, mouth half-open. The longer he touches Itachi for, the more uncomfortable their impasse becomes, and a small part of him hates the both of them for it. Everything _before_ had been easy, without thought, as natural and expected as waking up, or breathing, or opening one eye to a world riotous with color. “I just said you weren't.”

“My father is.”

Inscrutable, exasperating. “Look,” Shisui says slowly, and he pulls his hands back into his lap, twines them into one another. He mistakenly slips through boar and feels the numbness rise up in his joints for all of a second or two before dissipating. “I might not agree with your father on _every_ point he makes—”

Itachi snorts, and it's the first real amusement to cross his face all night.

“Yeah, yeah, I know.” Shisui cannot bring himself to look up all the way. He contents himself with snatching glances in fits and starts, with glimpses out of the corner of one eye. “But still. He's right.”

“I'm more than capable of taking care of myself.”

Shisui prides himself on his self control and focuses rather harder than necessary on a hangnail. “I know that.” He does, too, and the thought is terrifying; he'd nearly failed _years_ ago, had almost allowed Danzo to get to Itachi, but still—the fear is there, and the dreams of what might have been are there, and this irascible itch that he can't shake, this urge to be there, all the time, to try to shelter him, all the time—that's still there, too.

“Shisui.” Itachi is frowning at him, likely in concentration; it's a familiar expression, one that hits rather hard, because overlaid and underwashed are his other selves, younger ones that had _trusted_ Shisui, that had _listened_ when he said he'd be there, always, but what had he done besides leave the village at every opportunity?

I'd do anything to keep you safe, Shisui wants to say, but that is too unsteady a foothold, too much for what they are to each other now; it would doubtless be followed by tens of dozens more words, ones he's continually thought but never spoken, and they would be disastrous. “I would have offered anyway.” Shisui clears his throat, and somehow he feels like a frightened child again, sixteen and panicked and pulled in five different directions. Some days he can't tell what he hates more, his eyes or the standard issue jounin vest or the way his hands have begun to shake after he kills. “Even if Fugaku hadn't asked.” It isn't a lie, although it isn't quite a truth, either.

After the events that had transpired, Shisui had drawn away. It had made _sense_ at the time; it had seemed like the right thing to do, the higher road. He isn't as sure now, because here they are, years later, facing down the same set of political hurdles, the same opposition—except now there's an odd schism between them, a lag between thought and word and action that baffles him.

“I requested that he not.”

There's no hint to any sort of underlying emotion in his voice this time, and he's slipped into the voice Shisui has heard him use with the other operatives, with his teams, in the interrogation rooms. It's alien and frightening and a rather timely reminder of exactly who Itachi has grown to be. “That seems productive.” Shisui continues to pick away at the hangnail on his thumb. It's a disappointing cycle through pulling at it, pain, and then a pause, and then a repetition. He wonders how it is he can run missions and continue to operate with moderate to severe blood loss and injury, but can't seem to bring himself to yank a hangnail off. “Seeing as that's what we're doing anyway.”

Itachi is silent for a moment, while the not-so-distant river sighs below the bluff. “You should leave that be,” he says quietly. “Leave it be or rip it off.”

“Frankly,” Shisui continues, as if he hasn't heard a single word said, “I don't know why you'd even say that to him in the first place.” He can feel Itachi's eyes on him, knows that when he looks up his cousin will be just too close, because he never had a sense of personal space to begin with. “What changed, from before?” Because I would have jumped for you, Shisui thinks, would have made sure you got those eyes five years sooner, but that would have been a blessing and a curse and a nightmare all in one.

In his peripheral, Shisui can see Itachi's fingers curl, just slightly, can hear him breathe in on a catch and out on a coast. It's reassuring, without an anchor in time, and when he closes his eyes he can imagine that they're children and inseparable, because the only alternative is that they be the Uchiha, holding one another at arms length, hiding behind formality. Shisui looks up, although he doesn't need to; he wants to use his eyes, slide into his bloodline and burn needless images into his memory.

Itachi blinks, and the way he tilts his head is almost familiar, the planes of his face resolved into something _almost_ regretful—almost. “I don't want to discuss that.” His words have a rehearsed feel to them, one that Shisui can pick out in a heartbeat. Itachi talks far more than he did as a child, but everything is stiff, overdried canvas and convention compared to the slow, pondering way he speaks when it's to someone he trusts.

Shisui sits rather still and tries not to think about how he used to be that person, picks at his nail some more until a half-moon crescent comes off in his hand. He flicks it away, into the grass. “Don't want to, or can't?” He tries to keep his tone casual, studiously ignores the pain in his finger, the unsettling pull in his chest (that seems to rise up out of nowhere), the seemingly Pavlovian reaction he has to this particular set of political machinations. “You can still talk to me, if you want to.”

The question hangs in the empty air for a minute, a half-breath and an uncomfortable pall frozen into something shaped like an elderly family member whose face you can't quite recall.

“Shisui.” Itachi sounds tired, in a way that bespeaks signatures and sleepless nights and the perpetual fear of the abstract: death, loss, blindness, the ten of swords. Shaking hands and too much skin, veins in blue and the cold and then the warmth and then the cold again— “I can explain more, but you have to let me have some time.”

There's an undercurrent in Itachi's voice that sets Shisui's teeth on edge. He's killed too many people and almost lost one eye too many in order to keep that kind of fear out of Itachi's mouth for potentially the rest of his natural lifespan.

“That's fine.” Shisui pushes himself to his feet, reminds himself for the tenth time that this is not about him, not about them—it's about the clan and the village and the way the whispers of another coup have tugged on the earlobes of the elders, and about the best way to rid oneself of a beast (tame it, keep it close, kill it in its sleep). “Perfectly fine.”

The tree bark is rough under one hand. He can just glimpse a tiny bit of blood leaking out from under his ripped nail. It's bright against the bark, against the night sky, and for a minute he sees double, sees his own hand in the forefront of his vision, coming away from his eye socket red and shining and coppery with realization. He can definitively pinpoint this as the moment he stopped considering himself a child, remembers Fugaku allowing him into the closed clan meetings with one eye still bandaged, the disparaging _let's hope that one heals up nicely—_

It resolves into the present within the space of a second, and then he's looking down at Itachi again—an adult, fully grown, and thank _god_ he made it to adulthood because sometimes in the dreams they're as they were (children, assassins, monsters born and bred), fresh-faced and seconds from death or the cavalry. This, Shisui thinks, is something he'd much rather come back to, because Itachi isn't quite smiling and isn't quite frowning, but instead looking up at him.

“Coming?” Shisui stretches out his other, unbloodied hand, waits for a moment. “Must be tired.”

Itachi stares at him a moment longer with that ANBU look, the one cast somewhere deep behind his optic nerves, the one that sees far greater distances than just Shisui's face. “Thank you,” he says, and his hand is warm, palm calloused.

It's _something_ , Shisui thinks, and when he pulls Itachi up it's far easier than he expected it to be. He can't help himself when he looks Itachi over, assessing and evaluating and _god_ he needs to keep reminding himself to _stop_ doing that, but it's like he's fallen years back in time and suddenly feels the need to look out for every little detail. “Busy the next couple days?” he asks, tentative.

Itachi shrugs, tilts his head to the side just slightly. “More meetings, for the most part.” He leads them both down the makeshift path from the bluff, is able to navigate it without a second thought—clearly, this is still somewhere he frequents.

Shisui is suddenly reminded just how much he has been gone. Just finding where it had used to be had been an exercise in memory, in shuffling through cue cards and limbic recall and genin-level tracking skills. “The elders?”

“We meet with them this coming week. Paperwork.” Itachi peers over his shoulder for a moment, as if to ensure that Shisui does indeed exist. “Tedium.”

“Sounds like something I'd like.” Shisui realizes, belatedly, that he still has a hold on Itachi's hand, not dissimilar to a provoked limpet; he grins winningly and hopes against hope that it's enough to dispel any undue attention.

They're shoulder to shoulder, and he can see Itachi's lips twitch with what should have been a smile. “The first person I think of when I think about legal documents and contracts.”

“I'll stand around behind you and look intimidating.”

Their hands curl and brush and interlock and then drift apart again, two birds at the same pile of seed. It's an exploration in nostalgia, something familiar and foreign simultaneously.

“It's a lot of paperwork,” Itachi says, and Shisui thinks the forest suits him. “I wouldn't stand, if I were you.”

Shisui shrugs, raises an eyebrow. “Whatever you want.”

And really, that's how it's always been.

 


	2. Chapter 2

The training grounds are quiet, largely deserted. The late afternoon sunlight is watery and thin, weak with the brewing cold. Half-naked trees huddle closer to one another for some semblance of comfort; leaves in variegated shades of brown have begun to dot the yellowing grass over the past week, building up along the edges of the large clearing.

“I'm not surprised.” There's a frighteningly stolid set to Izumi's jaw. Her arms are crossed tightly over her abdomen, a nervous habit—she might be cold, or angry, or frightened enough to want to hide the tremors in her hands. It's a common occurrence, at least among the Uchiha who tend towards lighting-natured practice. “Fugaku was—was _alluding_ to something, you know? Even before you came back.”

Shisui scuffs at a sodden clump of leaves. “Didn't think I'd be their pick for it.” It's grown colder over the last several days, the sun setting earlier and earlier. In a way it's fitting, he thinks, that the old guard die with the last stumbling days of the year. “I haven't been good at talking to people since—” Since I got up in front of the council and betrayed my entire clan, because the alternative was even _more_ death, more bloodshed, more— “Since—since, yeah.”

Izumi snorts. The manner in which she raises her eyebrows looks uncannily familiar, although she's far sharper—far more acerbic—than Itachi would ever be. “I'm not going to sit here and pat your ego on the head, Shisui.” In another life she should have been a clanhead, or some sort of ferocious empress. “You either do it or you don't.”

“I don't really think _not_ complying is an option.” He tries for a grin, probably falls more than a little short. “Fugaku is something else.”

Izumi shrugs a little, an admittance of sorts. “I mean, no one can _make_ you do anything. Free will and all that.” Her lips are chapped—it's a detail, an inconsequential one at that, but it makes her look far younger, more honest. “At least in theory.”

The bitterness simmers just below her words, and for good cause: the half-blooded Uchiha are a sect of their own, straddling some irascible intersection between clan and village and a faceted sense of self. The ones who make it—the ones accepted wholly by the clan—have clawed their way there, without family or blood or privilege to vouch for them.

“You'd know,” Shisui says. He almost immediately regrets it.

She fixes him with a look, presses her lips together in a moment of decision. “I would.”

They walk in silence for several minutes, picking a slow, meandering path around the perimeter of the training grounds. There is a halo of mud churned into minute peaks and crevasses and spires in the center, working its way out until it is diluted by the straggling clumps of yellow grass. Underfoot, the wet leaves stick to their boots, to each other, to the wet slicking sounds they make. There's a numbness in Shisui's hands he wants to attribute entirely to the cold, but cannot.

“Fugaku only ever spoke to me once as a child.” Izumi's voice is sudden in the stillness, tinged with some sort of emotion he can't quite place. It isn't regret or nostalgia or anger, but something else entirely. “Once,” she says softly. “And it was to tell me that my value to the clan was in my actions.” She exhales, and her breath forms a cloud in the dying sun. “That was it, until I was of age and presented with the bloodline.”

Shisui says nothing, and instead focuses on placing each step carefully, eyes flicking between the ground and Izumi in profile, Izumi as an unknown variable instead of a precisely valued constant. It sounds typical, which is the worst part—typical Fugaku, typical mentality, typical hierarchy.

She sighs. “What I'm trying to say is that they'll take you—”

“Take you for what you're worth, yeah.” Shisui chews at the inside of his cheek and there's a bitter taste in his mouth that isn't blood. There's a not-insignificant part of him that wishes it was.

Izumi kicks a clump of leaves off the bottom of her boot. They pass a half-dead tree an scraggly underbrush, and start their third circuit of the grounds. “You think it would be worthwhile, though?” There's a bite in her voice, just dulled enough to the point where it doesn't break the skin.

“Maybe to change things.” Shisui follows her lead, falls half a step behind and chances a glance up at the sky. The tableau overhead is already overcast, but darkening by the minute, stained monochrome and broken by bleachy cumulonimbus. “It's wrong, I mean. The whole thing is wrong. The entire system.”

“I know.” Izumi glances back over her shoulder at him, pauses for a moment for Shisui to catch up. “Hana talks about that a lot.” She looks studiously at the ground, at the trees, at anywhere but Shisui.

“Inuzuka whispering about a coup as well?” He can barely keep the smirk off his face. “I'm sure she keeps you updated.”

“Come _on._ ” Izumi elbows him, but it's a token gesture, a holdover from childhood, and it's softened further by her laugh. It doesn't really hurt, not like how every other interaction these days seems to carry some new flavor of pain or discomfort or the unsettling feeling of _not fitting_ any more. “But really, they know.”

“About the village?” The question drags itself out of Shisui's mouth before he can stop it. He thinks he knows the answer, and he thinks he doesn't want to know it either.

Izumi nods, and there's a distinct shift in her bearing—movements sparse, less wasteful. It's years of training and conditioning and it aches. “They know about the offer the elders made.” She clears her throat. “They likely only offered the hat to us because no one else has a history of, well, you know—”

“Of being the crazy ones?”

“Yeah.” Izumi looks left, and then right, and then left again. Scanning.

Shisui exhales slowly, shoves his hands into his pockets. “I mean, I don't blame them.” It's almost completely dark now, muted red sun hanging low on the horizon, streaked with the dark bare branches of the winter trees. “Any protests?”

Izumi purses her lips, eyes narrowed to a point somewhere far off enough that he can't quite tell what she's looking at. “None that I know of. Not from the Inuzuka, at least.” There's something pulled taut in her tone, a spindle wound tighter and tighter over the years.

She was old enough to remember, Shisui thinks, old enough to know. “The Hyuuga?”

Izumi shakes her head. “Not sure. I'm not close enough with any of them, especially not lately.” She avoids his eyes, avoids looking at him at all before she next speaks. “Nothing from the Aburame, either.”

“I don't particularly care about their opposition,” Shisui bites out, and it's still raw, the memory, still _right there_ every time he thinks he's shaken it.

“I know.” Izumi sighs and turns to look up at Shisui, briefly. “Fugaku could have picked worse, though,” she says idly, although it's careful, calculated, hidden behind an understatement. “I mean, his own son? It might come across as nepotism, but he could have picked worse.”

“He's well-respected enough in the village.” Shisui feels rather far away from the situation, as if he were betting, placing odds, throwing sticks down in the dirt over and over in hopes of a glimpse into the future. “Former head of ANBU. He'll be fine.” He hopes the tension doesn't bleed into his tone.

“Shisui.” Izumi stops in her tracks, places a hand on his arm. It's tentative, an inquiry.

“Yeah.” He looks over her shoulder, at the scar she has on one hand, at the metal earrings in one earlobe—anywhere but in the eye, because he _can't_ , not today, not when he knows what's coming.

She glares up at him, a force in her own right. “Do they know about—” Her movements are quick, half-formed, but one hand is halfway to her eyes before she even finishes her sentence.

Shisui snorts. “Fugaku does.”

“The elders.”

“I hope not.” And therein lies the biggest problem. “I don't intend to use it, anyway.” He tries for another grin. “You have so little faith in my ability to talk nicely and rub shoulders with all the prominent figures of our day?”

The question, though, is a good one. Fugaku had mentioned nothing about kotoamatsukami; it's his best-kept secret ( _one_ of his best-kept, a small voice reminds him), and those who know it he can count on one hand. Two are dead, and therefore matter little.

Izumi maintains her eye contact, and there is something urgent in her expression. “Shisui, I'm being serious—”

“I know,” he says, and he's afraid it comes out harsher than he intends. “I know. I wouldn't _be_ the one going into that rat's den if I didn't have it.” There are definitely days where he wishes that Danzo had been successful, had taken at least _one_ eye, because then there would be no questions, no machinations, no continual manipulation of each and every scenario—

“All right, all right.” Izumi's tone is dismissive, but her eyes are kind. “Clearly a bad time.”

“Is there ever a good time?”

“Stop being so dramatic.”

“Me? An _Uchiha?_ Dramatic?” Shisui grins, leads them both out of the training yard; he is firm in his decision not to look back, because he no longer wants to know if anyone overheard.

* * *

Shisui meets him outside the Hokage's tower, situated in the heart of the city. It's eerie, as it always is when it rains like this; there is a small yet vocal part of Shisui that thinks he should have just taken the mission to Ame, because all the scenery would have been almost exactly the same. The streets are largely deserted, windows curtained in the late afternoon, as if the inhabitants couldn't quite wait for nightfall. It's a very relatable feeling—there is a significant part of Shisui that wants to skip right on out of here and crawl back into bed and continue dissecting the events of last night, continue parsing through the sentences and silences in turn.

He waits for Itachi to round the last corner and falls into step beside him, ascending the stairs with a kind of slow dedication usually reserved for stitching wounds. “Ready?” The word sticks in his mouth, and he fights down the nervousness, the underlying fear that this is just a trap that they're walking right into.

Itachi sighs. “Is there a correct answer to that?”

“I don't think so, personally.” Shisui pauses at the very top, waiting for Itachi to catch up; it's an unusual feeling. Years ago, in the field, he had felt as if he were constantly the one behind; it occurs to him it's been years since they partnered on any sort of venture, let alone sparred. “You all right?”

“Fine.” Itachi eyes him warily for just a moment, as if the Sharingan might pinwheel into being at any given moment. “Thank you.”

Shisui blinks, presses his lips together and keeps his thoughts to himself. “All right, then,” he says, slowly, and gestures to the wide double doors. “After you.”

Their footsteps echo on the polished wood of the floors. It feels wrong, feels like losing his balance on a branch or a stairwell or a railing, and teetering in empty space before either reflexes or gravity kick in. Shisui follows half a step behind, and it hurts a little—there's still an overwhelming instinct to protect, to speed up his steps just enough to be the one to lead, to confront whatever quasi-imaginary threats his mind has conjured up.

“What made you decide on the uniform?” Itachi does not look back, but instead speaks to the air in front of him. His movements are spare, meant to conserve energy. Shisui has seen this enough times to know it is precisely identical to what Itachi looks like when he's prepared for an ambush—ever vigilant, eyes roving in minute tics, hands restless. His arms are still at his sides.

Shisui tenses. He refuses to allow himself to be self-conscious, not now; the jounin vest is a heavy, reassuring press: a familiarity, a small comfort in the face of whatever entangled web they're about to waltz into. “Solidarity.”

“With the village, then?”

“You said it yourself.” They've reached the end of the hallway, and begin to climb another set of spiraling steps. “Furthest from the clan, closest to the village.”

Itachi pauses, one hand on the worn metal of the railing. There's something on his face that trips, falls, lands somewhere between hurt and conviction. “I didn't mean it like that.”

Shisui shrugs, reaching for the easy noncommittal of his usual demeanor. “I never said you did.” The wall hanging on the first landing suddenly becomes a highly attractive thing to stare at. “Figured I'd best look the part, though.”

“I see.” There is a minute tension working its way into Itachi's face, tightness in the jaw, beneath the eyes; Shisui doesn't blame him

“Stop that,” Shisui finds himself saying, and it's uncharacteristic for him as of late, unusually gentle. It is warm, easy, home-like; he waves a hand in dismissal. “Don't overthink it. You look like Fugaku when you do that.”

It isn't entirely untrue, and it is almost enough to coax a more relaxed expression onto Itachi's face. He still looks somewhat doubtful. “Should I have worn the ANBU—”

“No,” Shisui interrupts, and his words are sharper than intended. “No.”

Itachi gives him one final look—one last attempt to figure out what's running through Shisui's mind—before continuing to climb. “What makes you say that?”

It's voiced innocently, but fraught with complication and inference. Shisui has known Itachi long enough—if not consecutively—to know when he's fishing, looking for information that not he nor Shisui nor whatever gods might or might not exist have to offer.

Shisui follows, looks up at the crest emblazoned onto the back of Itachi's shirt, at the stretch of his shoulders, at the outline of his jaw, looks and looks and looks and wonders when, precisely, he grew up, outgrew Shisui— “You're an Uchiha.” He looks down, places each foot carefully, wonders how many people have walked this exact set of steps, considered treason or adultery or anarchism or murder. “They need to be reminded of that.”

Itachi pauses again, at the top of the flight of steps. From down the last hallway, there are voices—some raised, others muted and monotonous, a consistent rumble of idealism and prejudice. “That's an interesting viewpoint.”

If Shisui didn't know any better, he'd think he was detecting some sort of sardonicism in Itachi's response. “It is what it is.” He attempts to school his face into a neutral expression, but a wry grin gets the best of him. “You would have scared the shit out of them in uniform, though, so it's something to consider for next time.”

Itachi narrows his eyes, scrutinizes Shisui's face.

“It's a compliment.” His chest rises and falls just a bit faster than normal, Shisui notices, and then there's the characteristic drop of heavy-weighted panic into his chest, warm and writhing and nauseating. “You all right?”

“I'm fine.” Itachi looks briefly at the door at the end of the hallway, and then down to the floor. The illness is a carefully curtailed secret, much like Shisui's bloodline; if kept and contained and perpetually monitored, everything will be fine—in theory, at least.

Shisui lets the concern show this time, can't _help_ but let the concern show. He pitches his voice low; it's likely that no one has heard them thus far, but it is equally probable that they've been surveilled from the moment each respectively left the compound. “Are you still taking that medicine?” He reaches out, on instinct; it feels perfectly natural to pull Itachi closer, and he tamps down every other potential scenario in which this might occur to focus on the present. “You know, those supplements and the—”

“It's chakra exhaustion.” Itachi pointedly avoids looking Shisui in the eye, but does allow himself to be drawn closer. “I just need to sleep.”

“You can look at me, I'm not going to koto you,” Shisui breathes, and some of the irritability bleeds into his tone. He counts to five at a glacial pace, inhales and exhales before continuing to speak. “I just—I want you to be honest with me, okay? If this is going to work, I need to know.” He means this—this political partnership, of course, but it's been months since he's been this close with anyone, let alone with Itachi, and they had been _children_ then, for god's sake, afraid of seeing one another die, and sometimes Shisui wonders why he drew away, why he ran from the Uchiha instead of embracing them, but all those thoughts become _much_ more complicated when he isn't looking directly at one of the people he (potentially, Shisui reminds himself, _potentially_ ) loves most—

Itachi looks rather pointedly at some invisible coordinate below Shisui's left eye—it's enough for it to _appear_ that he's making eye contact, but not quite. “I understand.”

“Hey.” Shisui grips a little tighter, ignores the voice wondering whether or not Itachi's shoulders are too bony. “It's not because your father put me up to it.” He swallows, tells himself to keep making eye contact; it's just like calming a spooked animal, he tells himself. It will all be fine as long as he relaxes. “I just want to make sure you're okay.”

“Appreciated, but unnecessary.”

Shisui realizes, all at once, that he is clearly not going to get anywhere with this. “All right, all right.” He still gives Itachi a once-over, and makes an addition to the mental list of 'things we've procrastinated talking about'.

Itachi sets his jaw in such a way that it becomes evident that he brokers no argument. “We have somewhere to be.” He looks every inch the part, every inch the Uchiha. It's—it's certainly something, and Shisui is absolutely not at all distracted by the way the wide-collared shirt seems to flatter—

“You'll do fine,” Shisui rushes out, and tries to give him a reassuring smile. “I'll jump in if you need me to.”

Itachi's expression relaxes somewhat, and it's very, very close to contentedness. It's gratifying to see that they haven't entirely forgotten how to work together. “Thank you,” he says quietly, and it is sincere.

Shisui grins. “Don't thank me yet.” He slides his hand from Itachi's arm to between his shoulder blades, prodding him forward a little. “Let's get this over with.” He's gracious, gracious enough to ignore what might potentially be an eye-roll from Itachi, gracious enough to ignore his own nervousness.

The last length of hallway is suspiciously easier than all the varnished terrain that came before; Shisui firmly reminds himself that this is another assignment, with little to no bearing on his personal life, or Itachi's personal life, or his own weird infatuation. His gut doesn't seem to be very receptive to the message.

“Homura and Utatane are going to be in there.” Itachi's voice is cast low; he looks to Shisui as he speaks, hoping to quiet his words further. “You are aware of that, correct?”

It's surprisingly intimate. “I know.” Shisui chews the inside of his cheek, surveys Itachi out of the corner of his eye. He's going to be fine, _has_ to be fine: he's appeared before the council countless times as a jounin, but it's been eight years since he did it as an Uchiha. He swallows, scans the hallway, takes a silent itinerary of how many kunai he has, where they are, how easily accessible— “Don't worry, okay?”

Their footsteps echo, overlaid with the hushed cacophony of voices from inside. There are one or two louder, more ostentatious ones, and then a steady undercurrent of monotonous murmurs. It's akin to standing beneath the tower of babble, listening to fragment after clause after sentence, trying to parse through for some deep-seated, heavily-shrouded meaning.

Itachi makes a rather displeased noise in the back of his throat and pauses, one hand on the door frame.

“They might try to provoke you.” Shisui speaks very quietly, leaning down next to Itachi's ear. “Utatane, especially. She's least sympathetic.”

“I see.” Itachi's eyes flick back to the doorway, to the dias and the long table, the map of the land inlaid on one end, to the indistinct figures in variegated degrees of formal dress. There's a determined set to his jaw, a resolution found somewhere at the bottom of what they expect him to be, soaked through in expectation and duty. “I'm ready.”

It leaves a bitter taste in Shisui's mouth, sets a flutter of unease working its way up his spine. He says nothing, presses his hand to Itachi's back and guides him into the room. The Uchiha fan motif is warm under his palm, and it feels as if all the breath has been knocked out of his lungs.

The underlying flood of hurried conversation dulls to a trickle. Shisui canvasses the room, identifies Mitokado and Utatane, Tsunade and her aide, Kakashi Hatake, and several civilian heads of state; there's three possible ways out, two to five potential enemies, and almost certainly two to three ANBU members subsumed in chakra as such to render them invisible. He's no sensor, but he's almost sure—it would be stupid _not_ to post them, even as a mere formality.

For some reason, the trip from door to table seems unnecessarily long; the closer they get, the quieter the table becomes. Tsunade looks to them and nods in greeting, the tension evident around her eyes, in the way she holds herself.

Mitokado and Utatane do not look up at all, and Shisui can feel Itachi tense slightly, draw just a little bit closer.

“It'll be fine.” Shisui barely gives voice to the words, lets them drift on his exhale instead. “You'll be fine.” It feels like purposely triggering a poorly laid trap, like walking into an ambush, like acting on these stupid, distracting, recurring thoughts he keeps having. It's reckless, untoward.

Itachi nods once, motions stiff. When he does sit, he's the picture of cohesiveness, spine straight and head high.

Shisui seats himself as well and does his level best not to stare at Itachi. He settles into a comfortable position, fighting the urge to cross his arms over his chest: Utatane is already mowing him down with her glare, it's barely been a minute, and he's already ready for this to be over.

* * *

Tsunade adjourns around four in the afternoon, once it becomes evident that there will be little more progress made. It hadn't gone _poorly_ , but there's an air of tension filling the empty spaces, pressing outwards against the walls. Mitokado had said barely anything for the majority of the meeting; what little he _had_ said had been sparse, his mere presence meant to be promulgation.

Shisui's shoulders ache, and a distant part of him realizes he's been holding himself in a state of readiness for the last two and a half hours. In all honesty, he's rather proud of himself for keeping quiet, for maintaining his baseline calm; he'd aimed to never be in a room with Utatane and Mitokado again, and he'd done it—made it through without making the overwhelming desire to kill one or both known.

The room empties slowly. People leave in groups of two and three—civilian heads of state, commercial chairs, representatives from the lower legislative bodies—but neither Mitokado nor Utatane have moved.

Tsunade lifts her chin, just slightly; her gaze bores into Shisui, and it's as if she hopes to impress some idea into him without speaking. _Don't move_ , she seems to say, and he once again finds himself admiring her: years of working with these people, _years_ , and she had never once let them get the better of her. “Good to see you again.” Her voice is deceptively casual, a welcome addition of normalcy to an altogether unfamiliar setting. “I did mean to tell you, excellent work on that last A-rank.”

“Thank you.” Shisui relaxes a little; in his peripheral he can see Kakashi, at the far end of the table, pulling out a book. After the convolutions of the last several hours, Shisui almost doesn't fault him for it. “I'm always glad for the opportunity.”

Utatane stiffens, although she has continued to avoid acknowledging his existence, in a spectacular showing right on par with the entire council meeting thus far. Her eyes, instead, are on the door, the people slowly trickling out of it. Her face is unreadable, but it isn't Itachi's schooled blankness—even that, Shisui has learned to understand. No, the remaining elders have rid themselves of any and all tells, leaving nothing behind but a disparaging default.

“Good, good.” Tsunade smiles widely, runs a finger around the rim of her teacup. She nods to Itachi as well, clearly determined to put the room at ease. “Wasn't too terrible for the first one, right?” Her tone is conspiratorial, meant to ease the tension.

Several empty seats down, Kakashi sighs; it's punctuated by the sound of a page turning. “Get ready,” he mumbles. “We can go for drinks after this.”

Shisui stares at him askance. “It's barely three.”

“You'll want one.”

There's a hand on Shisui's arm, Itachi's warmth next to him. “There are three in the room,” he says quietly, next to Shisui's ear. His other hand, resting on the lip of the table, is casually shaped into something like the field sign for 'operative'. “Northeast, southwest, and above the door.” Itachi's gaze roves the room, never lingering too long on any one thing; there's conflict just below the surface, uncertainty.

Tsunade sits in silence across from them, now; her hand is still curled around her cup in a half moon, but her eyes are alert, sketching wide arcs across the grain of the wood. She looks sidelong at the silent elders every so often, watches _them_ watch the door, watch the people filtering out. If she's overheard, she doesn't let on. She's smart, Shisui thinks, letting them think she's a lush, that she drinks at every opportunity. It works to her convenience, he realizes, and begins to wonder what he's gotten himself into.

“Shisui.” The hand on his bicep tightens just a little, and when he turns to look at Itachi, there's the characteristic stubbornness, the cast to his face that means he isn't going to let it drop.

Something drops into Shisui's stomach, and it feels remarkably like fear. Up until two weeks ago, they had been _Itachi's_ operatives, he realizes—clearly, this hadn't been something discussed beforehand.

“Good to know,” he says slowly. It's hard to keep the bitterness out of his voice, not when he's sitting here asking for another round, not when he still wakes up with masks behind his eyes on a biweekly basis. Shisui sighs, leans one elbow on the table and tries to look bored, tries to look like he just wants to leave. It isn't entirely a lie. “Who?”

Itachi closes his eyes for a moment longer than usual; he's close enough to Shisui that the rapid-fire movement beneath his eyelids is visible. “No one I know all that well.” There's an edge to his tone that belies uncertainty, makes Shisui wonder whether they've inducted new members; it's not unlikely, particularly if the more conservative governmental officials are leery of an Uchiha kage.

“How so?” Shisui rests his chin in his hand and stares at Itachi sidelong.

Itachi almost smiles, then—almost. “Three of them.” he says. “You were right.” In the background, the last couple individuals are leaving, formalities and platitudes at hand.

Shisui is about to roll his eyes and snort when he chokes on it instead, and nearly jumps enough to bang his knee against the underside of the table. He thanks the powers that be and the years of interrogation training for the fact that he does _not,_ because Itachi's hand has slid to his thigh, pressing the hand seals into the outside of his leg— _Rat. Fox._ There's a longer pause, and then _Boar._ Shisui takes the opportunity to remind himself that this is a perfectly normal field practice, that this is not any sort of advance, and that he should in no way misinterpret it, and then immediately wants to walk out when he lets himself consider for a fraction of a second that he might _want_ it to be one.

There's a muffled snort from Kakashi, who is shaking his head in the manner of some long-suffering individual.

The door to the room swings shut. The moment it does, Utatane moves as if from a spring-release, entire demeanor changing from a careful lack thereof to an evident distaste. “What is the _meaning_ of this?” Her stature might have diminished with age, if the portraits of Tobirama's team are anything to go by, but her voice has remained wholly unaffected.

In his peripheral, Shisui sees Tsunade down the rest of whatever was in her teacup, and finds himself a little jealous.

“To what, exactly, are you referring?” Itachi's tone isn't outright _menacing_ , but it's certainly in the neighborhood. His eyes are narrowed, head angled in a way that hints at defiance without ever speaking it aloud.

“Koharu.” Tsunade sits up a little straighter, and the agitation in her voice is evident. “This is not the _time_ —”

Utatane slams a fist on the table. “When _is_ the time, then?” Her hand quivers against the wood, a small animal dropped from a great height. “He was to come alone, Tsunade, and instead—”

Shisui can't help the surprise that must show on his face; Fugaku hadn't mentioned that, but he also hadn't mentioned a lot of things. It's rather difficult to bring them to mind right now though, because he has a table full of displeased elders in front of him, and Itachi's hand still frozen against his thigh in boar. “I apologize,” he forces out, and does his level best to modulate his voice.

Itachi is _angry_ , which is evident at least to Shisui, and potentially Kakashi. “I was informed I was to choose one individual to accompany me.” He tilts his head slightly, and his eyes ahave narrowed to a razor-sharp scrutiny. “Was I mistaken?”

The stark words and crisp posture are at odds with the versions of Itachi that Shisui is familiar with: he's seen the uncertain, underscored by the Nakano and the moths and the white blooms and whorls of growths on the forest floor, and he's seen the machine, seen a fourteen year old systematically work his way through a three-man squad of adults in the space of half an hour. This, though—this he hasn't seen yet.

Mitokado speaks, for the first time in almost half an hour. “You were.” He steeples his fingers, pressing index to index, middle to middle, ring to ring— “I might go so far as to say that it was an unwise one.” He inclines his head. “And I am to advise you, am I not?”

Itachi's hands come neatly to the surface of the table; with palms flush to the wood, he aligns them with one another almost perfectly. It's a gesture easily misconstrued as contrition, as supplication—the look that hangs on around his eyes says something else entirely. “How do you define unwise?” The words drop out, slow and meted between breaths; there's a thoughtful incline to his head that bespeaks troubles, a fluid ease to his bearing that Shisui usually associates with a barely-featured white mask and silent movements in the dead of night.

Kakashi looks up from his book once again, however briefly; he furrows his brow slightly and returns to it just as quickly, but the time between turned pages lengthens.

The papery skin around Mitokado's eyes is tight, the wariness digging deep deep ravines into his skin, as if pulled by wires. He repeats himself, more forcefully. “I am to advise you, am I not?” There is challenge in his tone, wrought from the remnants of a much younger man left in the distant past with nothing but his prejudices and memories and a knife.

Itachi repeats himself in turn, presses both hands onto the table in a barely noticeable series of movements. “How do you define _unwise_ , councilor?” The skin surrounding his knuckles and the joints of his fingers is white, but his tone belies none of his frustration.

Shisui pitches his voice low, low enough that in an ideal set of circumstances, no one else will hear them. Vaguely, he wonders exactly _how_ good the acoustics are. “Itachi.” He has a fairly good idea of where this is going; he's also heard some rather reliable rumors that there are live bets out on how long it takes for Fugaku to string him up in the public sector of the compound, so he decides some sort of early action is best. “Itachi, maybe you should—”

“Enough from you.” It's Utatane, with a hint of a flush rising to her face, coloring the high-arched bones of her face like wrinkled winter apples. She's poised, leaning forward across the table as if she means to stand. “I tolerate you as a jounin, Uchiha, but as—”

Itachi speaks over her, and it is again the captain's voice, the cold one that brokers no argument. “I was instructed to pick any individual to—”

“You could have done better than to choose the man who killed an esteemed shinobi,” Mitokado interjects, and there's poorly concealed anger in his voice, a cutting edge just below the surface. “It's disrespectful in light of what we are attempting to accomplish between the Uchiha and—”

“I was instructed to pick any individual,” Itachi repeats, and his whole body is coiled taut, as if he's about to lunge. “Which I did.”

Shisui parses through the rather abysmal turn the meeting has taken and bolsters himself. Talking is his thing. People are his thing. It will be fine, he tells himself, and he puts a hand on Itachi's forearm. “Easy,” he says quietly. “This isn't worth it.” He can feel Utatane's stare burning into the side of his head, hear her disingenuous snort.

Itachi says nothing to that, but does relax somewhat; There's still a rigid quality to his movements, and Shisui wonders just how deeply ANBU was burned into his nervous system.

“I feel like this would have been something worth addressing _before_ the meeting.” Shisui keeps his tone casual, but the eye contact Utatane makes with him is scathing, but he's more pleased with the fact that Itachi has apparently found more than the bare minimum of self-preservation usually allocated per Uchiha, and seems to tolerate Shisui being the one to do the talking. “I was cleared of all suspicion,” he adds, and it takes a little more dedication than he would like to modulate his tone. “You were _there_.” He wonders if they had needed more proof than the blood, or the smooth-tissued scar under one eye. Shisui considers telling them he can recall it with photographic accuracy: Danzo's pinprick pupils, hand in his hair, kunai to the thin skin under one eye, and then his own panicked movements, the lucky shot of his that had sent the needlepoint tip lazing down towards his ear.

His breath catches a little in his throat.

“They were the ones _bringing_ charges, Shisui.” Itachi's voice is low enough that it is another aside, something that stays between the two of them, and there's muted anger there, potentially something that has been left to mature for years, eight of them.

Shisui can feel the minute movements of the musculature beneath his palm; the infinitesimal movements match the catch and release of Itachi's jaw, and for the first time there's a pang of true concern. “It's fine,” he murmurs, under his breath. “It's fine, look, just—”

This time, when Itachi speaks, everyone at the table is privy to what he says. “This isn't reasonable concern, this is bias.” He stares directly at Utatane in a way that brokers no argument.

Shisui can see the tension in his posture, in the way his shoulders are wired with nerves and anxiety and maybe a little bit of adrenaline. He decides to think about the 'reasonable concern' remark later, because _now_ isn't the time to wonder whether or not Itachi trusts him, or believes— “Itachi,” he says, voice sharp. “Not the hill to die on.”

Utatane leans forward over the table. The gnarled knots in her hands look like part of the polished wood. “Have you ever looked your partner's killer in the eye?” she asks, and it sounds as if she's commenting on tomorrow's weather, or a particularly good blend of tea. “Have you?”

Itachi freezes for a moment, lips parted, and he looks almost frightened as he turns to look at Shisui. For some undetermined span of time it seems as if he won't find the words in time. His gaze whips back to Utatane just as quickly. “The point is moot.” He lifts his chin slightly, the picture of poise.

Only Shisui can see the way his hands pick and curl and twist beneath the table; he fights back a sigh, because it's only been _four days_ and he's already concerned, both with Itachi's well-being—or lack thereof—and with his apparently burgeoning infatuation, which spikes to critical levels just as quickly as he justifies to himself all the reasons it would never work.

“Is it?” Utatane sits, slowly—she seems her age again, as she lowers herself into a comfortable position. She snorts, jerking her head at Shisui. “So much like Kagami.” It doesn't seem entirely like a compliment.

Tsunade slams both hands on the table and stands abruptly—there's just enough force behind her movements to remind everyone present exactly what she's capable of. “I think,” she says slowly, and her voice is clear as a bell, “We'd best adjourn for today.” Her gaze is steely, full of reproach; it slides from Shisui to Itachi to Mitokado to Utatane, and then to the door. “Reconvene in two days, bar any unforeseen events.”

It isn't until most of the others have left the room that Itachi exhales, slow and unsteadied.

* * *

Shisui waits until they're several blocks from the tower to speak. “That could have gone better.”

The sun casts long shadows in bas-relief, signs and spires and lit windows sketching eyelets into the growing darkness. There's the slightest edge to the air, a thin thread of the coming winter wending its way through the smooth-stoned roads. They pass the lit windows of a shop, and the red glow of the lamps slides across Itachi's face for just a moment. The distance between them is illuminated in dull, deep-berry light.

“An understatement.” There's no vitriol in Itachi's voice, just a dim resignation. “My father will be disappointed.” His eyes are trained carefully on the ground in front of him, and he walks without a sound; he could be a summoning or a clone or a ghost, for that matter, and no one would ever know the difference.

“We'll get there.” Another understatement—potentially the understatement of the year, as far as Shisui is concerned. He sneaks looks when he can, catches glimpses of Itachi as they make their way towards the outskirts of the city, and it's difficult to look away, difficult to keep himself from forcing the topic at hand. “I'll come with you, though.” Shisui clears his throat, tries to time his heartbeat with the rhythmic echoes of his boots on the paving stones. “You know, when you talk to him.”

Itachi nods, and it's a small, tight movement, something more akin to a bird, or the fast-tracked curves of a memory. He says nothing, pressing his lips into a thin line, chewing at the inside of one cheek.

“Hey.” Shisui bumps an arm against him. “Worried isn't a good look on you.” He punctuates it with an easy smile, tries to reincarnate the version of himself that had been so close to Itachi when they were children. It's been almost a decade, and sometimes he wonders if it's all just a futile effort.

Itachi looks over at him for just a moment, and there's almost the faintest glimpse of a smile there. “So you've said.”

This time, the silence is companionable; they slip back into the compound silently, and it feels like falling backwards in time; part of Shisui expects a seven year old Sasuke to run out yelling in his thin little voice, indignant at being left behind, Mikoto not an arms length behind him, and—

“We need to come up with a solution first.” Itachi slows his pace and turns to look up at Shisui. “Before we talk to my father.”

Shisui hopes his grimace isn't too visible, although that might be asking too much of the admittedly terrible luck he's had of late. “That would probably be for the best.” He blinks once, twice, tries to stop himself from _noticing_ things, from watching Itachi push an errant piece of hair from his face, from watching the pulse beat in his throat, from slipping into their bloodline and memorizing all of it— “Are you tired?”

They're at a standstill, somewhere between the past and the present. Shisui takes the turns to his apartment by rote, and thanks god that he doesn't have to think too hard about it. “Not really,” he says quietly, and it seems as if his words are subsumed by the softness of the dark. He takes the steps up the siding of the building, comes to one well-lit landing and then the next, and then stops outside his own door.

Itachi says nothing, stands stock still; he crosses his arms over his chest, and it could be discomfort, or frustration, or the chill. “Maybe we should talk, then.” It sounds as if the words are being dragged out of his mouth with extreme prejudice.

“Alright, alright.” Shisui shoulders the door open and fumbles for the light switch. A very distant part of him thanks everything in the world that he hadn't been home for long enough to make a mess. “You don't want to go home, I take it?” He tries not to think too much, tries not to consider the last time Itachi was here—potentially before it all, before his father had died, before everything—

Itachi shuts the door behind him, locks it, unlocks it, locks it again. He does not make any sort of effort to answer the question.

Shisui justifies his comment with a look. “You can still talk to me, okay?” He shrugs the vest off and tosses it over the back of the futon, kicks his shoes into a tumble by the entrance. “I don't care what it is, or what's going on. The offer still stands.”

Itachi looks down again, and focuses far too much energy on removing both shoes neatly and placing them carefully by the door. “They don't want an Uchiha.”

The difference between Shisui's haphazard piles and the neat manner in which Itachi puts things into place couldn't be more stark. “Of course they don't.” Shisui flops onto the futon with little to no ceremony and kicks one leg up. “You couldn't expect them to.” He grinds the heels of his hands into his eyes, trying to beat out the mounting headache.

“I know.” Itachi moves to sit at the other end, tentative; he ends up with his legs tucked up against his chest, head resting against the futon's back. “I was naive to think otherwise.”

Shisui sighs, kicks at Itachi's leg. “You were being optimistic.” He tries not to think about how much _older_ Itachi looks now, caught up in politics and responsibilities and whatever tangled mess is behind those animal masks. “A real treat, actually.”

Itachi stops brooding long enough for him to look up and almost smile, which seems to be about the best that can be done for right now.

“Anyway.” Shisui tries to focus on the topic at hand, on the political climate, on the concept of global warming, on the physics of arcing a throwing knife _just right—_ anything, to avoid thinking about their proximity and the mess he seems to be continually in the process of making. “You could always pick someone else.” He pauses for a moment, and he looks away, skims one hand across the textured fabric covering the cushions. “Or have Fugaku pick someone else, up to you.”

“I don't want anyone else.” Itachi rests his chin on his knees, taps a finger against his own ankle. “Don't trust them.”

Shisui wonders precisely what he did in a past life to end up born into this family. “That's healthy.”

Itachi shoots him a look. “It's self-preservation.” There's an odd tone to his voice, as if he's swallowing around marbles. He's quiet for a moment, tracing invisible patterns onto the fabric, creating symbols and seals in one breath and wiping them away in the next. The seconds of silence pull discomfort into the room enthusiastically, with two hands.

When he speaks again, the words are small and quiet in a half-lit room, hitched out with reluctance and circumspect pauses throughout. “She was onto something, you know.”

Shisui thinks back to Koharu Utatane, leaning over the table with fury etched across her features, hissing out _do you know? Do you know what it's like to look into the face of the man who killed—_ “What?”

Itachi shrugs, the gesture idle. “She knows. Knows we were close, knew that—that talking about people dying—” There's a spasmodic flash of something like fear, something like sadness; he clears his throat.

“I think you're jumping to conclusions too quickly.” Shisui tips his head back a little, trying to parse through Itachi's micro-expressions. As he leans forward, he wonders when it stopped being second nature to him. “All of it is spurred by the fact that they just don't want more than one of us in there.” He makes a vague gesture to the window, in the general direction of the tower. “All the way back to the fucking founders, they've been trying to avoid this.”

“There are individuals of the clan who still push for the coup.” Itachi's brow furrows, lips a thin line. “My father still thinks—”

Shisui makes a valiant effort to avoid rolling his eyes, or at least for it to not be so obvious. “Your father thinks a lot of things.” His mouth curls up a little, and the nervousness in his chest is threatening to burst out as a laugh. “He thought _I_ was a good idea, for one, and that went over _so_ well.”

Itachi is silent for a long moment; the way he searches Shisui's face is a definite change; his pupils flick back and forth as if he's memorizing it for himself, without the Sharingan, something that makes him feel like he's suddenly missing a vital internal organ or two. “I'm glad it was you.” His eyes are large, dark, enveloping in the dim light.

Shisui looks, and looks, and looks for too long. He forces his gaze away, down to his lap instead. “I am, too.” He clears his throat and looks to the ceiling for a chance of pace. “No one knows exactly how you bullshit like I do.”

“As I was saying.” Both Itachi's eyebrows have risen to an alarming height, and the look he fixes Shisui with is only slightly alarming.

It's fitting, because Shisui only feels slightly bad about it. Itachi has been this way since childhood, large-eyed and serious and full of idealism muted beneath the dust and residual blood of battlefield after battlefield. “As you were saying,” Shisui prompts, and forces himself to relax his shoulders, relax the vertebrae clicking relentlessly against their fellows, relax his features, relax relax _relax_ —

Itachi heaves a deep sigh. “We need to keep you there.” The way he averts his gaze is slightly suspect; there's something that tastes like guilt tucked into the dark circles beneath each eye, something that says he knows something Shisui doesn't. His voice hitches a little bit, and it must be because asking people for help is something he never learned to do. “I need to keep you there.” He swallows, keeps his eyes trained on the cushions of the futon. “Everyone knows you, they see you, they go on missions with you, they _like_ you—”

“Hey, hey.” Shisui taps one of Itachi's hands to draw his attention. “You don't need to justify it to me.” I'd do anything for you, he thinks, and for better or worse, it isn't an untruth. “I just want to help you.” He reaches, tentatively, to wrap both his hands around Itachi's. “It's what I'm here for.”

“I know.” Itachi's hand is not as cold as he'd expected, all dry skin and calluses. “I know.” He can't seem to look up.

Shisui fights back a frown, fights back the urge to do something incredibly stupid. “It's because I want to be,” he adds, and grasps a little tighter. “Not because I was asked. I would have done it anyway.”

An entire minute passes in silence; they are each frozen in place, an archipelago to the general discontent, to the way their lives seem to have meandered offtrack when they weren't watching.

“This isn't what I wanted.” Itachi's jaw tenses, works back and forth over his teeth. He seems very far away, as if seeing everything from some birds-eye view Shisui has yet to be privy to. “I didn't want this to be some political machination _._ ”

“Hey,” Shisui interrupts; he can see where this is going, has _seen_ this exact thought process manifest in its completion multiple times throughout his childhood. “Hey. Just because the circumstances weren't right—”

“It was a _bone._ ” There's barely hidden fury beneath the bones of Itachi's face, something that grabs his muscles and twists him into something not-quite-recognizable. It's all tempered by his perpetual calm, which makes the vaguest hints of anger all the more frightening. “They threw us a _bone._ ”

“Okay, okay.” Shisui raises his voice. “Okay, let's take a break for a minute.” He exhales slow, on one long breath—Itachi is _right_ , which is the most difficult part. “Just because this is how it happens doesn't mean— I mean—” He looks down in embarrassment. “Look, it's going to happen, machination or not. I still think it's a good choice on their part, but I'm a little biased.”

Itachi's breathing is sharp, wounding. “I didn't know how—how _difficult_ it would be until today.” He sounds unsure, worn down. “Utatane is going to take every opportunity to throw that in my face, that—”

“That I killed Danzo?” Shisui snorts; he fights the reflexive reaction to move a hand to his eye. “Fuck that. 'Esteemed shinobi'? Fuck that.” He grasps Itachi's hand, pulls it to his sternum; it's how the old clan heads used to have each member swear loyalty, and it seems fitting. “Whatever you need.”

It's almost entirely dark in the front room of the apartment; there's just enough light filtering from the kitchen to see by, and the window showcases nothing but the last dregs of the day's sunset. Itachi is wide-eyed in the growing darkness, gaze flickering between their hands and Shisui's face. He does not pull away. “I didn't want it to be like this,” he repeats, and this time there's no underlying rage to it, no anger—just frustration and regret and what might be guilt. “It wasn't supposed to be this messy.”

“We're going to figure it out, okay?” Shisui searches his face for any sort of tell, even the smallest flicker of emotion to go off of. “We'll look into it, we can figure it out.”

“We shouldn't _have_ to.” There's tension caught through Itachi's jaw, a hard cast around the eyes. “This is a farce to them.”

“I know,” Shisui interrupts. He wasted years simmering over the same set of facts, over the same convoluted mess; while understandable, it is also unproductive, and usually leads to some sort of downward spiral. He softens his tone before he speaks again. “I know. I'm here.”

Itachi is silent at that, although he opens his mouth once or twice and closes it again, contemplating. It's as if something bleeds out of him, or breaks open across his face—Shisui can't tell if it's the anger or the pride that is stripped away, but it leaves Itachi leaning against his shoulder, tentative, forehead pressing into Shisui's neck. Bodily memories of doing the exact same thing a decade ago rush in, and it's overwhelming, like looking through layers and layers of one illusion he can't quite disentangle.

“Okay?” Shisui moves almost without thought to wrap an arm around Itachi. It feels normal enough, natural enough, and he doesn't question it all too much. It's rare enough for him to seek out any sort of touch, so Shisui isn't going to push it. “You all right?”

When Itachi sighs, Shisui can feel the exhale. “Fine.” He clears his throat. “Just tired of this.”

“We'll talk to Fugaku tomorrow.” Shisui stares at the empty wall of his apartment, and sometimes he thinks it isn't all that different from the past, except now they're a _part_ of the council with it out for the clans, and just a little bit less powerless than before. It's awfully ironic, though, because it still feels just like being scared children in a dark room.

Minutes pass in silence. It's almost to the half-hour mark before Shisui's restless curiosity gets the better of him. He isn't an operative; he can't pass out at the drop of a hat the way many of them can, and his sleep cycle is likely considered moderately interrupted on a _good_ night. “Hey,” he says, and it's quiet, low, something hidden even from the silent walls and blank architecture of the room.

Itachi shifts slightly against him; Shisui figures the fact that he isn't gutted on the spot is some iteration of trust. “I'm awake.”

“You remember, at the Nakano?” Shisui clears his throat, and the entire situation is suddenly so very uncomfortable; he feels a little too exposed, a little too much like a turtle on its back.

“Vividly.”

“Glad to hear you aren't blind yet.” Shisui tightens his arm a little, drawing Itachi in closer. At the same time, he has a hard time justifying this to himself—it shouldn't be as comforting as it is. The guilt he feels over it is equally ridiculous—when he's killed, when he's let people die, when he's certain he'd be a war criminal if he were on the losing side, if there even _was_ a losing side— “I asked a while ago what had changed.”

He doesn't hear Itachi's sigh so much as _feel_ it, and he immediately regrets bringing it up in the first place. “Shisui,” Itachi starts off, and he sounds so very tired.

“Can I take it back, actually?” Shisui has never felt _less_ bad for interrupting. “I changed my mind. I take that back.”

Itachi yawns, and his voice is thick with sleep. “Why?”

Shisui shrugs; it's different, he thinks, from every other time in his life he's shrugged, or gestured, or shifted his weight, because each and every movement now has someone else's well-being in the balance. “Self-preservation, I guess.” He fights back a self-satisfied smile and the growing realization that he's in over his head. “Don't worry about it.”

 


	3. Chapter 3

Sun streams in through the bare windows, and Shisui can't quite tell if the light or the events of the entire day previous are what's causing his headache. He waits while the kitchen tap to run cold, waits and waits and waits and tells himself he is absolutely not in over his head.

He braces both hands against the sink's basin and exhales on one long, steady breath. It's a perpetual struggle, convincing himself that he doesn't care, not beyond any reasonable familial degree; it's a struggle to avoid acknowledging that he peers at the alcove his bed is in every thirty seconds precisely; it's a struggle to avoid acknowledging the only reason he had woken Itachi up and made him move in the first place was because his breathing had started to frighten him, in a manner not unlike the sensation of being thrown out into open space.

Shisui holds a glass under the stream, watches it fill with a detached air of acceptance. It's complicated—it's all complicated, a series of political plays behind an effervescent projection of what _should_ be, an acceptable iteration of what things should, apparently, look like.

There's a banging at the door, and Shisui realizes he's still half-dressed in yesterday's wrinkled clothes, and most definitely looks rather worse for wear. That being said, he feels little to no guilt in waiting an extra couple seconds to plod to the door. He blinks several times and cards a hand through his hair once or twice, looking for some semblance of order. He knows it's likely futile, but it doesn't hurt to try, right?

“You're up early.” Fugaku looks less than pleased, and his frown only deepens as he rakes down Shisui's body, taking in the admitted dishevelment.

Shisui blinks again, bemused. “Good morning.” He shifts a little, uncomfortable, and wishes he didn't sound so hoarse. “Can I help you?” With a sinking sensation, he realizes exactly what this looks like, and _god_ Fugaku is terrifying every day, but seven in the morning on a Friday has to be when his powers are at their peak.

Fugaky sighs, deeply, as if Shisui speaking causes him some sort of grave pain. “The meeting.”

“It was yesterday.” Shisui leans against the door frame and keeps his eyes trained on Fugaku's face, because if he's assertive and makes eye contact and passes as a functional human being, maybe Fugaku won't notice him looking like he just rolled out of bed. Which, while not fundamentally _untrue_ , doesn't really cast the greatest implications.

“I'm well aware.” Fugaku's brow is set into a series of rigid, unmoving lines, and he might as well have pulled out a goddamn knife for the impression he's giving right now. “My son never came home.”

Shisui opens his mouth and then promptly closes it again. “Correct.” His throat is still very, very dry, he realizes, although it could also be from fear, or the induction of a fight or flight reaction, or that his clanhead is on his doorstep at the crack of dawn with murder in his eyes.

“He's here.” It isn't really a question.

“Also correct.” Shisui catches himself folding his arms across his chest and considers stopping himself; in the end he doesn't, and he doesn't care all that much if it comes off as aggressive. “He's still asleep.”

Fugaku frowns at that, and he seems to pick apart Shisui's face with a look, seems to parse through whatever happens to be on display. It feels rather like an interrogation, rather like 'enhanced interviewing methods', to use the politically correct term. “You didn't find it necessary to inform me?”

Shisui heaves a sigh and wishes it were socially acceptable to slam the door in this man's face and go back to his comfortable nest of blankets on the couch. “Look,” he says, and then falters. It's one thing to rehearse endlessly in the dark, staring at a ceiling he can't quite make out; it's another to actually speak to the man in front of him. Shisui rubs at one eye and decides he gives up. “Can you—”

Fugaku's eyebrows have slid far enough up his forehead that they seem to be in danger of disappearing into his hairline. “No, I can't.” There's an annoyed authoritativeness in his tone that's hard to listen to without grinding his teeth.

“Look, give us half an hour.” Shisui swallows, and just how incriminatory 'us' is becomes immediately clear to him. “Twenty minutes.” He sets his jaw, looks Fugaku in the eye. “Yesterday was a lot.”

“You have some gall, don't you,” Fugaku says, and it's tinged with disbelief. He takes a step back and examines Shisui as if seeing him in some new light. “It might not be a complete waste, then, your familiarity with the village.” His eyes are hard, hard like the rough rocks along the Nakano. “Sometimes I think they've made you soft.” A beat. “Reluctant to do what's necessary.”

Shisui pulls himself up to his full height, tries to ignore the strands of nervous numbness working their way into his limbs. It's nauseating. “You're entitled to think what you want.”

The silence sinks, a live animal twining itself between their legs, warm and covered in fur and blood. Shisui thinks he hears someone moving around in his apartment, although it's just as likely it's his imagination, or wishful thinking.

Fugaku huffs out a breath in what might have been a laugh, in some other, milder world; when he turns on his heel, it's without preamble. He pauses at the top of the stairs. “Shisui.”

Shisui tilts his head back in acknowledgment; he almost feels intimidating, right up until he remembers his bedhead.

“Twenty minutes.” With that, he heads down the steps, each step creating a distinct reminder of his passage.

The fucking asshole.

Shisui exhales in a rush and slams the door; it's _cold_ this early, and he can feel the gooseflesh rising on the back of his neck, even in the warmth of his apartment. He nearly trips over the corner of the rug on his way through his excuse for a living area, and isn't quite able to bite off the swear that pops out as he rounds the corner. It doesn't really matter, though, because for some reason watching Itachi wake up in his bed is doing something to the animal part of his brain that has him ready to bang his head on the wall and shove his heart into his throat. Not like he needed that, anyway.

“Hey.” Shisui perches on the very corner of his bed, arms carefully crossed over his chest. “You awake?”

“I have been.” Itachi sits up, slowly, as if drawing out the process will ease what comes with it. He coughs, clears his throat. “Sorry.”

Shisui realizes, belatedly, that this must be what goes on every morning. There's a small, vocal part of his mind that reminds him that this would be foregone knowledge, had he not all but ducked out of the clan. “It's all right.” Shisui keeps his mind to facts, to the mundane. “Do you want water?” He isn't looking at the dark ribbons of hair on the skin of his neck, isn't looking at the line of his jaw and where it comes up to meet his ear, isn't looking at the peek of collarbone, because Shisui has always been broader and that is _his shirt—_

Itachi shakes his head, and the aborted motion of hand-to-chest is likely more evident than he'd like it to be. “It'll go away.” He tucks his hair behind one ear, and seems to try to look anywhere but at Shisui. “It happens.” Itachi clears his throat again and makes a face, something that might be embarrassment. “Just in the morning, but it does.”

“Okay.” Shisui isn't quite sure what else to say; there's nothing he dislikes more than being rendered powerless, and he well knows you can't fight genetics. It's difficult to survive long in this clan—in _any_ clan, really—without coming to realize that. “I, uh.” His mind keeps going blank, freezing up and sending him spinning off into some fantasy world where this is the everyday, the mundane, and he needs to _focus—_ “Your father was here.”

“I heard.” Itachi's hand twitches in the blankets, as if there's some gesture, some motion he's preventing himself from making; tension seeps back into the lines of his face and pools beneath his eyes, in the hollows on each shoulder. “You were rather forthright.”

“Yeah, I was.” For this, Shisui looks up, looks right at Itachi, tries to make his shrug seem loose, casual. “I don't know, he'll probably get me back later.” And even as he says it, even as this entire situation hovers around their ears, he doesn't totally believe himself. There's always the possibility, the mildly irritating voice of doubt in the back of his mind—have I done enough? Proven myself? Done my fair due? Placed the clan ahead of all else—

Itachi wets his lips, breathes in on a shudder, opens his mouth as if he's about to speak and then rethinks it once or twice or three times.

Part of Shisui wonders how much has gone unsaid, how much has happened and been mumbled of to the rocks, to the trees, to the immutable river. He faults himself for his absence. “Anyway, uh.” He watches Itachi clamber out of his bed, watches the way Itachi fills his own clothes in a way that is the same, but not the same, watches and tries not to _want_. “He said twenty minutes.”

“Understood.” Itachi seems to look at Shisui without seeing him, or potentially while seeing through him. “Thank you.”

Shisui lifts a shoulder in an idle acknowledgment, inclines his head. “Whenever.” It's very, very hard to look him in the eye of late. “Mine is yours.”

At this, Itachi does stare right at him, for a little longer than he's comfortable with. He scoops his own shirt off the bed. “Is that so?” The Uchiha fan is a bright splotch of white and red, a discoloration, a blight.

Shisui watches with no small amount of regret as Itachi sweeps off to the bathroom. It's only when he hears the latch click that he himself gets up, runs slapshod through what would have been the morning, except he's washing his face in the kitchen sink and trying to tame his hair without a mirror, but it doesn't matter all that much, really. It's always been a thankless task, and there's freezing water dripping down the back of his neck where he'd tried to wet it and get it to lie _flat—_

“Do you want help?”

In his peripheral, Itachi lays Shisui's shirt over the back of the futon; he seems to be scrutinizing, considering. Shisui blinks the water out of his eyes and runs a dishtowel over his hair. “This is an every day event, you know.”

Itachi narrows his eyes a little, and tilts his head in a way that seems wholly reptilian. “Ready, then?” He, of course, looks put together, and not as if he'd gone five rounds with a static-charged raccoon.

“Are _you_?” Shisui gives him a look before brushing by; he's shoving his feet back into his shoes when Itachi ends up next to him again, close. Almost _too_ close, which Shisui decides based mainly on the fact that he can see a stray eyelash stuck to the skin under one eye.

“You forgot.” Itachi holds up his headband, dangles it from one hand like a lure or a hunting trophy, or something dead. “Just sit for a second.” By the critical look on his face, Shisui can safely assume that his hair is still terrible and rebelling against all attempts at confinement; more distracting is the calculations going on behind the scenes, patterns of thought he can only identify by length of his association with Itachi, nothing more. Sometimes, when Shisui lets his mind idle too much, this is distracting as a thought and as a manifest concept.

“As you wish.” Shisui is asked to sit, and so he sits, perching on the arm of the futon with one knee up. It's fine. This is fine. This is all fine. This time, though, he doesn't let his gaze waver; he looks at the bits and pieces of Itachi he can stomach. It's a lock of hair here, a patch of skin there—a movement, a breath.

They're knee to knee, shoulder to shoulder. “I heard, earlier,” Itachi says, and his tone is a low murmur, words splashing over one another in the quiet. “What my father said.” He combs a hand through Shisui's hair, pushing it away from his forehead in a one-two-three tug. It isn't clinical, but isn't overtly intimate, either—mostly it's just confusing.

“You did, then.” Shisui stays very, very still. This is something new—it isn't clinical, but isn't overtly intimate, either. It swings wildly between the two and lands on confusing, a new iteration of something that's barely back from the dead as it is. “I figured as much.” He hears his own breath hitch, and he wants to die or evaporate or potentially shunshin himself out the fucking door; the only thing really stopping him is the burning in his stomach and the overwhelming desire to never move from this spot again, ever.

“For what it's worth,” Itachi says, slow and quiet, “I don't think that some softness is a bad thing.” He smooths the curls back from Shisui's forehead one more time.

Shisui feels the weight of the headband settle back onto his forehead; Itachi ties it into place, and it feels like a denouement of sorts. “Soft in what way?” He catches Itachi's wrist as he withdraws, searches his face for a tell, for a slip, for _anything—_

“The clan is right about a good many things.” Itachi keeps his eyes trained on some point near Shisui's shoulder. It's downright infuriating. “That doesn't mean they're right about everything.”

“That's something, coming from you,” Shisui breathes, and really, he should have known; Itachi has never wanted to be clan head, he's wanted to be this since he was seven years old, maybe even _younger—_ “Soft in what way?”

“Not a bad thing.” At this, Itachi looks him in the eye, and it's something frightening, something terrifying, something as sharp and elusive as the concept of time, of aging, of growth. He brings his hand to Shisui's face, and his palm is cold.

Shisui stays stock still, and his mouth is probably half open, but it's all coming together—they've grown up, grown apart, gone more and more blind each year, and the blinder you get the more you see how awful your nation has become; the older and the blinder you get, the more afraid you are, the more willing to do the drastic in order to bring about any sort of change at all. “So says you,” Shisui replies quietly. His own hand, he notices absently, is just about the same size, and he must look stupid, sitting here like this, but it's probably the clearest moment he's had in months, if not years.

Itachi brushes his thumb over Shisui's cheekbone, and he would likely smile if he weren't himself. “You hesitate before you kill.”

-

The meetings do not get easier. If anything, they become worse—with so many individuals and so much dislike, it isn't entirely a surprise.

Something resolves itself, in Shisui's mind, as they again leave the tower and make their way towards the compound. He thinks he might have known for a week or two now, but it's difficult to be sure of anything any more.

“It can't be me.” He says it casually, forces his tone into its usual cadence. “As adviser, I mean. Not after how it's gone.”

The frisson of stiffness in Itachi's posture is evident almost immediately. “There's going to be an adjustment period.”

“Still.” Shisui chews the inside of his cheek, looks straight ahead, pretends he doesn't feel Itachi's shoulder bump against his. It's purposeful, in its immediacy, and as much affection as he might hope for in public. Part of him doesn't want to admit how frightening that is, or how much sublimated meaning it holds. “Murder doesn't just disappear.”

“It was self-defense.”

Shisui does not look at him, but he can imagine with eerie accuracy the exact set of his jaw, the subtle displays of emotion. “They aren't going to see it that way.”

Itachi's sharp exhale is audible. “Danzo tried to rip your eyes out.” He clears his throat. “I'm no expert, but that might absolve you from blame.”

“That's not how things work.” Shisui feels the desperate laugh bubbling up, trapped dizzying against his lungs, rendering him short of breath. He wonders if this is how Itachi feels all the time. “You're exceptional, but terrible at reading a room.” He also considers that Itachi can read the room just fine, and simply doesn't care.

They continue on, in wordless agreement. Skirting the compound, Itachi instead leads them to the river, to the same spot they'd frequented countless times. It's striking that the first time they'd really spoken again—here, no less—was mere weeks ago; the memory itself is hazy, distant, reminiscent of early childhood instead of the recent past.

“So what do you propose instead?” Itachi comes to a halt at that same tree, and something about it all is terribly nostalgic. The copses of trees are nigh-identical to a decade earlier, and so is the way he stands with the bark to his back, and so is the expression on his face, curiosity and frustration and subtle discontent all rolled into one.

Shisui turns to face him, plants his feet shoulder-width apart, shrugs with a forced ease he hopes he can replicate well enough to be convincing. “Izumi. She's smart, well-liked, invested for the right reasons.” For some reason, his forehead protector feels unusually heavy today. “Shares similar ideals to you.”

“You're ceding the position, then.” Some unnamed emotion slides across Itachi's features, and for a moment he is irascible, unreadable, caught between countless potential reactions.

Shisui does not let himself look down. “Your father miscalculated.”

Itachi's lips quirk, as if he wants to smile, or potentially admit that Shisui was right for once. “Not untrue.” The manner in which he avoids eye contact is a learned behavior, a studious one.

The silence hangs heavy and still in the early morning sunlight. It's an intruder, an invasive species introduced to control a species gone rampant. Shisui wonders where he went wrong, where he strayed from what he was meant to do. Part of him thinks—the part, no doubt, that produces the nightmares, the ones where Danzo kills him, the ones where he kills _himself_ , in front of Itachi, and there is nothing more inescapable than a red-eyed Mangekyo, an elusive truce—that there is no right thing in the first place.

“I hope you understand.” Even as he speaks, there's something inside him that rebels at the idea of letting people down—no, of letting _Itachi_ down, because as long as he's lived after his father's death, there have been precious few people who mattered.

Itachi is calm, diplomatic as always. “I do.”

“Okay.” Shisui wishes he'd worn his tanto; the harness is a familiar, grounding weight that he finds himself missing. “Are you all right with this?”

“Fine.” When Itachi lifts his chin like that, he looks awfully like Izuna, awfully like a terrible kind of hubris. His words are soft, diplomatic—not a thing there to belie any sort of upset. “I'll be fine.”

Shisui, again, wants to laugh, wants to do something idiotic, wants to kiss the frown lines off his forehead. “You will be.” His hands play a game of tense-and-relax; he does a wonderful job at pretending not to notice. “Izumi is amazing. I trust her.”

“Are you taking away missions, then?” Itachi's tone is businesslike, but there's a discomfort in his posture that is far more telling. He looks young in the clan's crest, in the clan colors—it's misleading, portraiture in learned deception. Shisui wonders, and not for the first time, if that's why he continues to wear it.

“You tell me.” He hates this feeling, this empty, hungry sensation. It's defined entirely by coveting, by wanting without the ability to ever _have_ ; Shisui wonders in perpetuity if pride is simply the virtuous downfall of every single Uchiha that lives, and wonders with each wanting if it's come for him too. “I'll do whatever it is that you want me to.” He inclines his head, hopes that it serves as a conciliatory, hopes that he _isn't_ assigned somewhere far away.

Itachi frowns at his punctuatory smile, at the potentially glib way he's delivered this. “I'd be a fool to think I could keep you in one place.”

Shisui imagines a summer storm, a tempest, a civil war; he imagines death by drowning, the feeling of sinking into the Nakano. “You're going to be in charge of the entire village in a few more days.” He considers how easy it might be, to flicker right out of existence, to slip from place to place to place more quickly than the eye can move, and then drops the idea with both hands. “My place is wherever you want it to be.”

It's terribly anticlimactic, in the weak autumn sunlight—there's the last of the cicadas out now, but not nearly enough of them to form any coherent tune. There's a bird or a grouse or some other small thing moving in a nearby treetop, and the soft sounds of the tree branches shaking against one another is so very loud in the white noise, so very loud against the quiet rumble of the river.

“You're contradicting yourself.” Itachi's eyes are fixed on the misty horizon, on what little sunlight makes it through the cloud cover.

Shisui finds himself wondering how much of it Itachi can actually see. “I'm not leaving.” I'm not leaving _you_ , he wants to say. He scuffs a foot in the dirt, admires the riotous colors of the moss and lichen. It's very easy to imagine it overgrown, with the village and the river and them both all in its belly, all covered and rendered insignificant by time. “I just can't be on the council.” It's frustrating to admit, frustrating to say—after weeks of this, it's an ache of an admittance.

Itachi looks over at him, at his eyes, and it's a moment of realization. “I see.” And he likely does—sees the Mangekyo, sees that all the village and the elders and the council themselves will see will be the Uchiha's influence, the ability to change minds, the ability to poke and prod and scrape away at decisions until there's not much else left but bones and a monument— “It wouldn't be a real peace,” he says, and each word is slow and meted. “Not with that hanging over their heads.”

“It wouldn't.”

The intermittent silences swing low to the ground; a tern skims the surface of the far-off river, whirls up into the sky in a cloud of feathers, and dives again.

“I'll still be here.” The quiet becomes maddening with increasing alacrity. Shisui bumps his shoulder against Itachi's, and it's very much like being their younger selves for a moment. “ _Someone_ has to escort to social functions to charm everyone, right?” And really, it's true, but it's a simplification of a truth, a glib way of saying hey, you know, I'm not going to go anywhere.

Itachi smiles. “I wouldn't mind.”

* * *

Watching Izumi and Itachi work together is almost terrifying in its efficiency, Shisui thinks. Even more terrifying is the look he gets from Izumi when she catches him sitting on the windowsill, yet again.

“Your friends dislike when you do that.” She peers up at him over a sheaf of paperwork thicker than her hand. “There's also a door, and stairs.”

“I'm making sure your security is up to par.” Shisui lands neatly in a crouch on the carpet, and glances up to where he's relatively sure the ANBU operative is. His friends. Right. “It's also late. I didn't think you'd still be here.”

“Izumi's right,” Itachi says absently. His nose is dangerously close to the paper he's looking over. “It's undignified.”

Shisui raises an eyebrow, and steps around to the front of the desk. “The civilian heads of commerce returned your proposal.” He slides the scroll forward, taps it on the desk twice. “They seem to be warming up to us.”

“Thank you.” Itachi looks up, briefly, and the tiredness in his face is more pronounced than usual; the underlying steel is still there, but it's been shored up by the day-to-day, by months of bureaucracy and stepping around old graves. “Have you heard back from Suna yet?”

“It's only been a week,” Izumi says idly, and adds another page to the pile of reviewed documents to her left. “Their turnaround is usually longer than that.” With brisk, businesslike movements, she shuffles the papers into some unknown order that makes sense to her and her alone.

“Yeah, I wouldn't expect anything just yet.” Shisui braces both hands on one edge of the desk and leans forward a little; if he's casting a shadow directly onto what Itachi is trying to read, well. He isn't terribly upset about it. “Itachi.”

“Yes, Shisui.”

“Itachi, it's almost nine.”

In his peripheral, he can see Izumi roll her eyes; underneath the sass, she looks just as exhausted, and Shisui can't really help the prickle of concern. “Good luck with that,” she says, shrugging on a winter coat.

“I saw Hana downstairs.” Shisui punctuates it with a grin. “She said something about how going in the window was immature.”

“It _is_ ,” Hana says, from the doorway. “I'm not fifteen, and I wouldn't be caught dead jumping up the side of a building.”

“Some of us have no sense of propriety.” Izumi's tone is teasing. She tugs Shisui to the side, jerks her head at Itachi. “I'm leaving,” she adds, in a low aside. “See if you can get him to.”

Shisui pulls a face and nods in assent. “Get out of here, though. Don't want to make Hana sit through an entire clan meeting.”

“That's what it feels like sometimes, _really_ ,” Hana laughs; she tugs Izumi away by the hand, always the whirlwind in a quiet room. Their voices echo out into the hallway, and from inside the office Shisui can catch bits and pieces of hurried, happy conversation, fragments of another person's life.   
Shisui breathes out, looks away; he paces the rather worn stretch in front of the desk, works a cramp out of one shoulder. It's three passes back and forth and almost an entire minute before he's interrupted.

“You can sit if you like.” Both eyebrows raised in surprise, Itachi gestures at Izumi's abandoned chair. “I'll only be a little longer.”

“Fifteen minutes.” Shisui sits, albeit reluctantly, and slides his chair a little closer to Itachi's. “Fifteen tops.” He himself is overwhelmingly tired; up until the last six months or so, he wasn't even sure it was possible to attain a state where sleep helped very little, if at all. There's always one more thing to do, one more business relationship to smooth over, one more emissary run to take—

Itachi seems almost apologetic when he glances over at Shisui. “Fifteen minutes, then.”

“Your attention span never ceases to amaze me.” Shisui rests his chin on his hand, watches as Itachi fills out another page in near-perfect penmanship. He's fairly content to sit here and wait; it's become routine, sitting and waiting and watching. There's a significant part of him that wants to do more—the part of him that didn't want to cede the council position—but it's easier to tamp down when reminds himself of what a mess it would have been, reminds himself that he simply doesn't have the _temperament_ for this, not to mention that half the information in these files would have him ready to stage his _own_ coup against the village, and—

“I can sit still for longer than five minutes.” Itachi's lips quirk, and it's almost an amused little smile. “Maybe you should take up meditation.”

Shisui rolls his eyes, and the next eight and a half minutes are not unpleasant, largely filled with the brush of ink over paper, the crinkling of waxen edges.

The scraps of sky peeking in through the windows sre already dark, and the hands of the clock are the only indicator of any passage of time at all. It's a vacuum, a nerve center set away from everything else—somewhere quiet, where an hour is a minute is a month, because time has been behaving oddly recently, slipping by in clumps of days and weeks. Things aren't good, not just yet: there's still so much to repair, reform, so many alliances to make, treaties to broker, relationships between clans to mend.

“Hey.” Shisui stretches, leans to the side a little to bump his shoulder against Itachi's. “How are we doing?”

Itachi shrugs, reaches up to run a hand over his face. “It's decent. Difficult to reread.” He flips the file shut, slides it a couple inches forward, as if it's something alive.

Shisui peers down. “The ANBU reform proposals?” With a sigh, he stands up, holds out an open hand. “I thought you presented that to the council two weeks ago.”

“The council still believes in utilizing all available personnel.” There's something simmering in Itachi's tone, which makes _sense_ ; of course it's a personal source of contention. “Unfortunately.” He takes Shisui's hand, though, and there isn't the moment of pause there was three, six months ago.

“Child soldiers.” Shisui tugs him to his feet, tries to keep the disapproval out of his voice. He likely does very poorly with it. “They mean child soldiers.”

“I'm well aware of what they mean.” Out of anyone else it might have sounded contentious, but from Itachi it just sounds worn—clearly a point run over time and time again until the cloth begins to thin away. He glances over at Shisui, and it's a familiar series of calculations, a litmus test for his reaction. “Izumi used those exact words earlier this week.”

Shisui reminds himself to congratulate her at some later date. “I'm sure that went over nicely with the council.”

“They had some thoughts on the specificity of the wording,” Itachi says, diplomatic as ever, but there's something like a smile playing at the edges of his mouth. “We adjourned.”

Shisui makes a face. “Maybe for the best.” The one meeting he'd made it through had been disastrous, to say the least; he'd be lying to say that part of him wasn't jealous, that part of him still wanted to be there, that part of him feels like he's abandoning what they've been working towards every time he leaves, but— “When's the next session?”

Itachi grasps Shisui's hand just a little tighter as they make their way towards the door. “Three days or so.” It's a comfort—something steady to come back to, something quiet, conversations and breaths and plans interspersed between emissary runs and diplomatic missions. “We're waiting on Tsunade and Neji Hyuuga.”

“I'll still be here, then.” Shisui grins, coming to a halt right before the door. The hallway is half-lit at this time of night, bathed in the inelegant shading of fluorescence and the wintertime darkness. “Think I can sit in, if I'm very quiet and don't make a fool of myself?”

Something in Itachi's face softens. “Of course.” He looks down far less often now, and it's a reminder of some other type of composure, the same reserved steeliness Mikoto has in spades. “I'd have you here more often, but—what was it, you said we'd need a 'people person' as an advocate.”

“I know.” Shisui presses Itachi's hand to his chest, an echo of their conversation months ago. “I know.”

Itachi is silent for a long, long moment, and sounds of the building echo through—water running through the walls, the underlying electric buzz of the half-light, drafts breathing through open doors and cracked windows. “We're getting there,” he says, finally, and it's far more hopeful than it used to be.

Shisui leans down a little, just far enough to press his lips to Itachi's forehead, to pull him closer and rest there. “I know. I'm happy for you.”

Things aren't good, not just yet, but they're certainly better.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> happy... early birthday? i hope you liked it, lucy.


End file.
